It has been more than 26 years since the Internet Archive has taken up the preservation of all kinds of digital material, including software, games, movies, images and, of course, web pages. The Wayback Machine is the engine that handles the ever-increasing task of collecting and collating snapshots of the Internet, and has come a long way since the mid-90s.
The Wayback Machine is a real virtual time machine. With it, you can go back in time and see what websites looked like at certain intervals throughout history. This can be extremely helpful when doing research or fact checking, and watching how web design has evolved over the years.
The Wayback Machine was able to archive two terabytes of data in just one year, which at the time was a huge amount of data. These days, you can store it all on an inexpensive USB stick and carry it around in your pocket.
Today, the Wayback Machine has over 700 billion web pages in its database and is approaching 100 petabytes. Unfortunately, the job of a nonprofit isn’t getting any easier, as paywalls and other restricted places like Facebook make it harder to take over. Will the record of today’s social media activity be adequately preserved 20 years from now?
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If the metaverse materializes, as some predict, the Internet Archive will have to scale up its data collection efforts accordingly or it will not keep up with what is happening in the digital common space.
Not everyone believes that the archive has the right to do what it does. When the Internet Archive launched the National Emergency Library without waiting lists early in the pandemic, several publishers said it amounted to deliberate mass copyright infringement.
The Internet Archive closed access to this library early, hoping to avoid possible legal fees, but the publishers filed a lawsuit anyway. In July, both parties filed a motion for summary judgment.
Source: tech spot
