Starting out as a project to archive online materials, with a lot of speculative ideas of how to handle data at scale, the archive.org website was hosted at a shifting set of locations across its early years. It ran at razor-thin margins while rubbing hardware and software elbows with all sorts of then-famous sites; it directed its staff towards nebulous and aspirational goals while trying not to burn through its resources.
Stand back, we’re not sure how big this Archive is going to get.
A lot changed in October of 2001, when the Wayback Machine was rcs data to the world at a ceremony at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, and the Web spontaneously developed something it hadn’t really had before: a memory.
That Memory went from a feature to a core utility for the internet.
Collections such as the Prelinger Library and the Live Music Archive were also coming along for the ride, providing a way for people to just get to the good stuff and not face down web banners and pop-up ads just to listen and watch culture from a growing set of sources and reaching back farther in time, to before the web itself.
Serving a massively-enlarging set of data to a massively-increasing audience became an engineering and cost problem, and ultimately the problem – how do you retrieve and provide terabytes, then hundreds of terabytes, then petabytes, then dozens of petabytes of data to your patrons without, again, falling to a thousand potential problems?
Photo by Ben Margot of Associated Press, 2006.
The short answer is that you work very hard with a very dedicated crew with a shared vision, but the longer answer is that sometimes, issues arise.
Many issues.
Network equipment crashes, power strip failures, unexpected configurations and firmware upgrades gone wrong. Unaccounted growth in files, surprise operating system limits, and countless other snags and roadbumps have hit the archive over nearly three decades. These problems are definitely not unique to the archive’s existence – many other websites and computers in the world experience the same snags.
Some of the snags have been localized – an item stops loading, or a filetype renders wrong in some browsers. Others will take out a rack of machines, a fleet of drives, and late nights or long days bring them back to service.
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