This is exactly the problem that archive.org was set up to deal with. They’ve been doing an excellent job of it, and their cost-per-gigabyte-month is only going to drop as storage and bandwidth become cheaper.
Yes, they have been doing an excellent job. I’ve donated to them more than once because I find myself using the IA on a nigh-daily basis.
But the IA is no panacea. It can only store some categories of content reliably, and the rest is inaccessible. Nor have I seen them hold & distribute the truly enormous datasets that much research will use—the biggest files I’ve seen the IA offer for public download are in the single gigabytes or hundreds of megabytes range.
This is exactly the problem that archive.org was set up to deal with. They’ve been doing an excellent job of it, and their cost-per-gigabyte-month is only going to drop as storage and bandwidth become cheaper.
Yes, they have been doing an excellent job. I’ve donated to them more than once because I find myself using the IA on a nigh-daily basis.
But the IA is no panacea. It can only store some categories of content reliably, and the rest is inaccessible. Nor have I seen them hold & distribute the truly enormous datasets that much research will use—the biggest files I’ve seen the IA offer for public download are in the single gigabytes or hundreds of megabytes range.