BermudaHighball

joined 2 years ago
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Update: Downloading all archive.org metadata in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Yes, exactly why I wanted to start this project. It's nice to have the Internet Archive but we cannot trust that content won't be taken down eventually. Even just storage costs might become an issue in the future for data that gets maybe 30 total views over many years. But it is nice to hear some of the data you were looking at is coming back.

Long term, it would be nice for a community of users to create a decentralized index of Internet Archive metadata so it cannot get taken down and has the torrent files of the content so people can share it and participate in the seeding for the content they care about. The Internet Archive might cooperate to make it easier to do this, for example by using Bittorrent v2 which would help us detect file duplication and not have to use padding files since all files are aligned to pieces in v2.

Currently there is little incentive for people to seed the Internet Archive content but no doubt it will become more important to do that in the future.

38
Update: Downloading all archive.org metadata (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
 

Following up from my previous post.

I used the API at https://archive.org/developers/changes.html to enumerate all the item names in the archive. Currently there are over 256 million item names. However I went through a sample of them and noted the following:

There are many, many items from the archive which have been removed. Much higher than I expected. If you have critical data, of course Internet Archive should never be your only backup.

I don't know the distribution of metadata and .torrent file sizes since i have not tried downloading them yet. It looks like it would require a lot of storage if there are many files or the content is huge (if only 50% of the items remain and the average .torrent + metadata is 20KB it would be over 2.5 TB to store). But on the other hand, the archive has a lot of random one off uploads that are not very big, so some metadata is 800 bytes and the torrent 3KB in those cases (only 640 GB to store if combined is 5 KB).

Will upgrade to 0.19.6 sometime today in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The link to the above release post has the wrong caption for me. Its title says "Ambulance hits Oregon cyclist, rushes him to hospital, then sticks him with $1,800 bill, lawsuit says - Divisions by zero"

Downloading all archive.org metadata in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Yes, I think so. I'll definitely use the example for downloading some of the files (.torrent, metadata file) once I have some items. But first I need to find all the items ever uploaded.

Downloading all archive.org metadata in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Thank you for the tips. I am actually interested in enumerating metadata for all the "items" as defined by the API page ever uploaded. For example, one item = one ID:

Archive.org is made up of “items”. An item is a logical “thing” that we represent on one web page on archive.org. An item can be considered as a group of files that deserve their own metadata.

You did cause me to look at the API docs again, though, and I think I found something that does enumerate all item names, and as a bonus, it will keep you updated when changes are made: https://archive.org/developers/changes.html

We'll see how much progress I can make. It might take a while to get through all the millions of them.

27
Downloading all archive.org metadata (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
7 comments fedilink
 

I'd love to know if anyone's aware of a bulk metadata export feature or repository. I would like to have a copy of the metadata and .torrent files of all items.

I guess one way is to use the CLI but this relies on knowing which item you want and I don't know if there's a way to get a list of all items.

I believe downloading via BitTorrent and seeding back is a win-win: it bolsters the Archive's resilience while easing server strain. I'll be seeding the items I download.

Edit: If you want to enumerate all item names in the entire archive.org repository, take a look at https://archive.org/developers/changes.html. This will do that for you!

2
Whatever happened to DNA-based storage research? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
 

It seems like 6 or 7 years ago there was research into new forms of storage, using crystals or DNA that promised ultra high density storage. I know the read/write speed was not very fast, but I thought by now there would be more progress in the area. Apparently in 2021 there was a team that got a 16GB file stored in DNA. In the last month there's some company (Biomemory) that lets you store 1KB of data into DNA for $1,000, but if you want to read it, you have to send it to them. I don't understand why you would use that today.

I wonder if it will ever be viable for us to have DNA readers/writers... but I also wonder if there are other new types of data storage coming up that might be just as good.

If you know anything about the DNA research or other new storage forms, what do you think is the most promising one?

1
Warez: Do you pirate software or just use FOSS? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
 

In the past, most software I used was paid and proprietary and would have some sort of limitation that I would try to get around by any means possible. Sometimes that would be resetting the clock on my computer, disabling the internet, and other times downloading a patch.

But in the past few years I've stopped using those things and have focused only on free and open source software (FOSS) to fulfill my needs. I hardly have to worry about privacy problems or trying to lock down a program that calls home. I might be missing out on some things that commercial software delivers, but I'm hardly aware of what they are anymore. It seems like the trend is for commercial software providers to migrate toward online or service models that have the company doing all the computing. I'm opposed to that, since they can take away your service at any time.

What do you do?