Have you visited Kickstarter? Asking for a friend.
Getting a safe deposit box these days means opening a regular account and using it so often to avoid fees etc., in addition to the fee for the box.
I would be deeply surprised if the Internet Archive thinks that this policy is actually a good idea in principle; but I suspect that the fact that much of what they do is almost certainly wholesale copyright infringement makes it a pragmatic necessity.
Ordinary libraries can be limited in their ability to copy their collection, and potentially if they want to shift it to microfilm or digitize it; but since they collect things(for the most part) that were sold as objects under first-sale or equivalent doctrines they can obtain legally impeccable copies of even copyrighted and restrictively licensed works.
The IA faces a body of information that is trivial to duplicate; but which typically never exists in a first-sale-able form and which is copyrighted by default in most cases outside of see government work; and tends to be explicitly liberally licensed only by nerds who care about that sort of thing(not that most of the people too disinterested to have any licensing terms are likely to sue you; but anywhere in Berne Convention land they’d have solid grounds for doing so).
That makes their work, unfortunately, on the sort of delicate ground where angering potential copyright owners is very dangerous. That doesn’t require giving the current domain owner veto over the past, if the domain has changed management; but I suspect that they don’t have the resources to do defensive rights clearance.
I don’t like the situation; but I can’t imagine that copyright litigation over much of the archive would go their way at all; which makes caution understandable.
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I expect at that point I’ll be too busy running from the zombies to worry about retrieving my screenplay.
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I think ten years is a reasonable time, if you look at the sort of information we saved when we still used paper as the main medium. Now many receipts have you kept that were on paper, how long did you hold on to that stack of greeting cards before they ended up in the recycling? Some we keep, some we discard. And so I feel it should be online, that we try not to keep everything, but the stuff that we want to keep, well, we keep it in several different “boxes”. And to fight off bit rot you need to open it, have a look, and make sure it’s still a good memory. Or even if it has any value.
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It can be expensive, but DataSavers can probably recover pretty anything that isn’t corrupted.
Just be aware that most safety deposit vaults are poorly climate controlled so humidity and temperature extremes can damage storage media. Large or numerous desiccant packs might help a little, but I wouldn’t trust it exclusively.
Also be aware that it’s become increasingly easy in North America over the past few decades for third parties to obtain legal documents which require banks to give them access to your safety deposit box. Banks keep drills on site to punch out locks for such purposes and for accounts that are in arrears. And of course government agencies have even easier access to legal requirements.
Those are just the legitimate ways to crack your safety deposit box open, and doesn’t even take into consideration the shenanigans of banksters like Wells Fargo with their contempt for bank law. Here’s a story of a shady bank manager who stone-walled a woman who turned in $100K she found in her safety deposit box…
I’m not saying don’t use a safety deposit box, but don’t store anything in one you can’t afford to lose and make sure any data is encrypted.
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If you ever travel back in time, would you please tell my 1995ish self that I should not keep those HDDs sitting on shelves and in the basement? And repeat the message yearly until maybe 2005 or so?
(Seriously, I lost my complete BBS XP messagebases like that. BBS like in “I can probably still whistle carrier signal” and “my node is my castle”. And XP like Crosspoint.)
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You haven’t started running yet? You’re behind the curve!
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Someday, this will happen to Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, etc.
And someday this will happen to The Internet Archive. If something is important to you, back it up yourself.
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I get where you’re coming from, but the thing is that you don’t need to defensively rights-clear against an entity that doesn’t own the content in question. I can understand how retroactive archive deletion supports the copyright-defensive stance, but it’s such a blunt instrument in its current form. At the very least a more reasoned approach would be to temporarily unpublish retroactively on a robots.txt change, pending research into when/whether the domain changed ownership. (I recognize that this would take nontrivial time and effort, but there are lots of approaches to triaging this sort of work. Also, please donate to IA, mutants.)
Interplanetary file system, or storj, or sia, or filecoin…
Well two of those are currently functioning, at least…
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I noticed the other day I still had an old BBC broadcast in my iTunes, a Mary Ellen Hobbs dubstep showcase from the early 00’s, and she gives each artist’s website during the playlist-- every single one is "myspace dot com, backslash. . . . "
Not that any of those artists are still using myspace, but it was a funny throwback.
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In positive news, kids growing up over the past couple of decades can maybe look forward to a time when their youthful indiscretions might be permanently deleted.
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Yeah, how about retaining your backups, MySpace? What level of incompetence leads to wiping out twelve years of data and being unable to restore any of it from back-up?
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It’s important to occasionally verify that the whole backup/restore cycle works. The only thing worse than no backup is discovering you have a collection of faithfully maintained write-only media.
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I always tell people that if they only have one copy of their data, even if that copy is “in the cloud”, then they are vulnerable.
For example, Wired (at the time) journalist Mat Honan lost his entire digital life when his Apple account got hacked and they erased everything. Apple restored it, but I wonder how helpful they would have been to someone who didn’t have a bully pulpit?
I’m sure that THEIR backups are just fine. THEIR data (code, infrastructure, etc) is probably all nicely archived. Their user’s data, not so much…
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The thing that gets me about this is that it’s all well and good to remind people to have backups of their data, but sometimes it’s not “your” data - for example, music from a band I am not in. Even if I am expected to save all the songs of every musician I had a passing listen to and might unexpectedly ten years later feel some random nostalgia for (and I do try!)… what about stuff that no one remembers, that no one’s attached to?
I guess I feel like every time this kind of data is lost, the internet loses some of it’s richness and wildness, since forgotten depths of old stuff no one remembers is undiscovered territory that can be explored by intrepid internet adventurers. Who knows what gems have been lost because they were posted in the wrong era, only known to disinterested friends and family that didn’t realize what it was?
In light of that, “backup early and often!” feels a bit like watching a library burn down and someone turning to you and saying “at least your diary is safe at home!”
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Old Macs used a special variable speed method for writing to floppies. It’s how they were able to get 800KB onto disks that normally could only hold 720KB. It also meant that you need special drives to read the disks. Fortunately there’s a solution:
They aren’t cheap but if you have a local maker space, hacker space, or retro computing enthusiast group it’s likely someone may already have one - or may have vintage hardware you can use.
I was able to borrow someone’s Kryoflux and dump hundreds of old Mac 800KB floppies and either use them with vMac or just extract the files I wanted.
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The key words here are “freely distributable” - a lot of stuff that folks are sharing/storing on social media is stuff that they want to control access to. Pics of kids are the one type of content that comes immediately to mind. Granted, nothing on social media is really “safe”, but it at least provides the illusion of safety to parents that don’t want pics of their kids on the broader internet.
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