Backing up the Internet Archive

The wonder of the Internet Archive's petabytes of stored data is that they're a world treasure, providing access to a mass of information and stored culture, gathered from decades of history (in some case, centuries), and available in a (relatively) easy-to-find fashion. And as media and popular websites begin to cover the Archive's mission in earnest, the audience is growing notably.

In each wave of interest, questions come forward out of the accolades:

Why is the Internet Archive only in one (actually, limited) physical space?

What is the disaster recovery plan?

What steps are being taken to ensure integrity and access?

Some of the answers are essays in themselves, but regarding the protection of the Internet Archive's storehouses of data, a project has been launched to add some real-world information to the theoretical consideration of data protection.

The INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK project (also known as IA.BAK or IABAK) is a combined experiment and research project to back up the Internet Archive's data stores, utilizing zero infrastructure of the Archive itself (save for bandwidth used in download) and, along the way, gain real-world knowledge of what issues and considerations are involved with such a project. Started in April 2015, the project already has dozens of contributors and partners, and has resulted in a fairly robust environment backing up terabytes of the Archive in multiple locations around the world.

Visit http://iabak.archiveteam.org to see the current status of the project's data storage and to learn how you can contribute disk space and bandwidth..

IA.BAK has been broken and unmaintained since about December 2016. The above status page is not accurate as of December 2019.

THE PHILOSOPHY

The project's main goals include:

Maintaining multiple, verified, geographically-disparate copies of Internet Archive data

No use of Internet Archive infrastructure, that is, machines or drives (bandwidth just for download)

Keep at least 3 external copies in three different physical locations from the Archive.

Conduct bi-weekly verification that the data is secure in the external locations.

Expire or remove data that has not been verified after 30 days, replacing it with functional space.

The project's secondary goals include:

Add ease of use to the end-user clients so the maximum amount of drive space contributors can participate.

Offer optional peer-to-peer data provision for both the main site's items and to speed synchronization.

Issue useful conclusions as to how the project is conducted.

Ultimately provide encrypted versions of some data so that internal/system data can be backed up too.

The project rests on several assumptions:

Given an opportunity and good feedback, there are petabytes of volunteer disk space available

The Internet Archive will gain more awareness by the general public by this project

A non-homogeneous environment for the data makes the data that much stronger and disaster-resistant

The project is an educational workshop as well as a good-faith effort, providing hard answers to theoretical questions.

WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED SO FAR (ABOUT THE DATA)

To understand what might be involved in backing up a large set of data, information about that dataset needed to be researched.

The project, known as the Internet Archive Census resulted in some solid numbers, as well as a set of facts that helped nail down the scope of the project. They include:

The Internet Archive has roughly 21 petabytes of unique data at this juncture. (Growing daily.)

Some is not available for direct download by the general public, so IA.BAK is not addressing it (yet).

Some data is, by its nature, more "critical" or "important" than others. Unique acquired data versus, say, universally available datasets or mirrors of prominent and accessible-from-many-locations music videos.

A lot of the data — the vast, vast majority — is extremely static, and meant to live forever.

A lot of the files are "derives", and marked as such - files that were derived from other files.

The Internet Archive reserves the right to delete uploaded content.

The census classified the total store of public-accessible, unique data as very roughly 14 petabytes. Of that data, there is some level of redundancy and there are collections that might be called "crown jewels" or treasures (the Prelinger Archives, the Bali Culture collection, collections of scanned books from partner libraries) while others are more "nice to have" (universally accessible podcasts or video blogs, multiple revisions of the same website backup).

WHAT WE HAVE DONE SO FAR (ABOUT THE IMPLEMENTATION)

There is a channel, #internetarchive.bak, on EFNet, for discussion about the project as well as bot-driven updates about code changes and new contributors. It is occasionally very active and mostly quiet in between new issues being handled. It is not required to use as a contributor of disk space, but is an excellent resource for questions.

After multiple discussions, the back-end for this phase of this project is using the git-annex suite of tools. Reasons include the maturity of the project and the willing contribution of time by the git-annex code designer and maintainer, Joey Hess (also a co-founder of Archive Team). Other possible software suites are listed at the end of this Wiki entry and might play a part in future revisions of the project.

To read the git-annex overview and proposal, go to: INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK/git-annex_implementation

To read the git-annex implementation documentation, go to: https://git-annex.branchable.com/design/iabackup/

CHOOSING WHICH DATA AT THE ARCHIVE TO BACK UP USING IA.BAK

As space is relatively limited to provide to IA.BAK, the project has had a second task line of choosing which public-facing data at the Internet Archive to push into IA.BAK. Generally, the group is looking for:

Data unique enough that it is predominantly at the Internet Archive

Data that does not flood the capacity of the project, i.e. hundreds of Terabytes

Data that does not generally limit which countries can host it

Data that is generally smaller in size, yet still unique

There is now a page to nominate sets of data at the Internet Archive that should be added to future shards:

The project status page has methods for seeing what collections are now in the project, although it lacks simple search (yet).

KEEPING TRACK OF THE DOWNLOAD AND BACKUP PROGRESS

The IA.BAK project page, http://iabak.archiveteam.org/, provides a graphical overview of the progress of the project. Updated frequently, it shows total amount of space backed up, the status (red to green) of amount of backups of a given set of data, and timelines of how data is being acquired from the original sources. It also includes maps to show the geographical disparity of the clients, as well as how the clients are performing.

It is a continual challenge, and an ongoing one, to make navigation of these pages intuitive and informative. As the dataset grows in size and complexity, major changes to the layout of the pages will continue.

As with everything else, the infrastructure to maintain this page is completely separate from Internet Archive machines and resources.

CONCERNS

Since the beginning, there have been a number of concerns voiced about the project, and while most can't be glibly dismissed, it is good to at least acknowledge them (as they tend to take the first minutes of a conversation about the project).

Bad Actors will always be a continued concern, as person or persons determined to prevent the backing up of data could execute endless actions to slow down, corrupt, or ruin their contributions of space.

The Great Restore is the time when data from IA.BAK must return to its home to handle a physical or software-based failure of the Internet Archive's data stores. (This could be anything from an earthquake, fibre line cut, or to the dropping of an EMP). A restoring would definitely involve the leasing of a large amount of upload bandwidth and some amount of physical transfer.

See Also and Additional Information

Alternate proposed software suites for this project besides git-annex:

Valhalla - Valhalla was a discussion about the "ultimate home" for uploaded Archive Team data, be it the Internet Archive, elsewhere, or both. IA.BAK is an example of a potential shared home, although Archive Team projects have not generally been backed up using IA.BAK, yet.







