> On Aug 21, 2026, at 2:48 PM, Doug Jackson <[email protected]> wrote: > > Years of experience has said I have to be responsible for my own destiny....
Fewer more true words have been written. My own approach to archiving and preservation around this kind of thing has been multi-faceted: - No cloud storage as primary data. Backups only. Cloud providers go away, change policies or opinions, and are tied to an individual maintainer - Local copies of anything that matters, on high-resiliency storage (a two-vdev ZFS pool) - Migrate the whole thing to fresh media as capacity and budget permits (100+TB of storage isn't cheap to swap out wholesale) - Likewise local backups (an offline removable pool that incrementally accepts snapshots of the primary store), portable in case of facility loss mostly because I live in wildfire country and have a non-zero chance of needing to evacuate with minimal notice - Monthly snapshots out to S3 for partial disaster recovery - archive.org as the authoritative copy. It's public-facing, has a reasonably high chance of staying online, and isn't subject to one dude being in a position to pay a bill or retain interest The only caveat around archive.org is that I won't rely on the "Wayback" web archive. It's fragmented and prone to poor coverage. I prefer to coalesce as full a mirror as possible — like I did with the Xalba archive — and then run that through the whole rigamarole. Maybe I'm a little extreme but the fact of the matter is we're already losing and have lost so much in just a few decades. Our institutional/cultural knowledge and set of primary sources are decaying every year that goes by. Not to mention the hardware itself. In my opinion, that's a problem worth tackling head-on. The "small web," comprised of lots of pages tended to lovingly by individuals and small groups, is a wonderful thing. We need more of it in the world. More curation, more attention to detail, more heart and soul in it. However, we can't bet the future on that. We've all seen what happens when the hard work of an individual goes away.
