3mo ago

Do you use anything to archive content for yourself or others? (research, videos, articles, and anything that could be lost to time or censorship)

I saw this post and I was curious what was out there.

https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/113444325077647843

Id like to put my lab servers to work archiving US federal data thats likely to get pulled - climate and biomed data seems mostly likely. The most obvious strategy to me seems like setting up mirror torrents on academictorrents. Anyone compiling a list of at-risk data yet?

It's Me @lemm.ee

eccentric @lemm.ee

3mo ago

Do you use anything to archive content for yourself or others? (research, videos, articles, and anything that could be lost to time or censorship)

10 0

38 comments

One option that I've heard of in the past
https://archivebox.io/
ArchiveBox is a powerful, self-hosted internet archiving solution to collect, save, and view websites offline.
- Going to check that out because....yeah. Just gotta figure out what and where to archive.
- That looks useful, I might host that. Does anyone have an RSS feed of at risk data?
- I am using archivebox, it is pretty straight-forward to self-host and use.
  However, it is very difficult to archive most news sites with it and many other sites as well. Most cookie etc pop ups on a site will render the archived page unusable and often archiving won’t work at all because some bot protection (Cloudflare etc.) will kick-in when archivebox tries to access a site.
  If anyone else has more success using it, please let me know if I am doing something wrong…
  
  Monolith has the same problem here. I think the best resolution might be some sort of browser-plugin based solution where you could say "archive this" and have it push the result somewhere.
  I wonder if I could combine a dumb plugin with Monolith to do that... A weekend project perhaps.
- This seems pretty cool. I might actually host this.
- Eyy, I want that!

NOAA is at risk I think.
- Everything is at risk.

I have a script that archives to:
Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Texts, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine
Webpage archive
Ghostarchive, a website archive
Self-hosted https://archivebox.io/
I used to solely depend on archive.org, but after the recent attacks, I expanded my options.
Script: https://gist.github.com/YasserKa/9a02bc50e75e7239f6f0c8f04fe4cfb1
EDIT: Added script. Note that the script doesn't include archiving to archivebox, since its API isn't available in stable verison yet. You can add a function depending on your setup. Personally, I am depending on Caddy and docker, so I am using caddy module [1] to execute commands with this in my Caddyfile:

route /add { @params query url=* exec docker exec --user=archivebox archivebox archivebox add {http.request.uri.query.url} { timeout 0 } }
[1] https://github.com/abiosoft/caddy-exec
- isn't this prone to a
  
  || rm -rf /
  or something similar at the end of the URL?
  if you can docker exec, you have a lot of privileges already, so be sure to make sure this is not a danger
  
  Thank you for the warning. You are correct. It's prune to command injection. I will validate the URL before executing it. This shoud suffice until archivebox's rest API is available in stable.
- Would you be willing to share it?
  
  Sure.
- I hope you are also donating to the projects for uploading multiple copies to different services.

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/
they have an automatic VM that dowloads stuff in distributed manner and uploads to archive.org
- archive.org is hosted in the US and could end up being a valid target. It doesn't strike me as being a very good place to securely store anything nowadays. I'd consider anything hosted in the US to be out.
  
  Depends on the threat model.
  NOAA and others gets underfunded/change of menagement and need to close down open access to stuff.
  or
  Data becomes illegal to possess and feds start knocking on Web Archive doors.
  or
  Web archive will do something stupid and will get sued/DDOSed
  In only one very unlikely scenario it won't be availble due to recent events. But still redundancy would be good regardless of recent stuff.

For myself: Wayback It saves link to multiple different web archives and gives me pdf and warc files.
For others: Archive team have a few active projects to save at risk data and there is IRC channel in which people can suggest adding other websites for saving. They also have wiki with explanations how people can help.

I don't self-host it, I just use archive.org. That makes it available to others too.
- It’s a single point of failure though.
  
  In that they're a single organization, yes, but I'm a single person with significantly fewer resources. Non-availability is a significantly higher risk for things I host personally.
- There was the attack on the Internet archive recently, are there any good options out there to help mirror some of the data or otherwise provide redundancy?
- Yes. This isn't something you want your own machines to be doing if something else is already doing it.
  
  But then who backs up the backups?
  
  Your argument is that a single backup is sufficient? I disagree, and I think that so would most in the selfhosted and datahoarder communities.

I use M-Discs to long term archival.
- I heard news recently that some companies recently started shipping non-m disks labelled as m-disks. You may want to have a look

I archive youtube videos that I like with TubeArchivist, I have a playlist for random videos i'd like to keep, and also subscribe to some of my favourite creator so I can keeptheir videos, even when I'm offline
- I'll add pinchflat as an alternative with the same aim.
  
  Seems nice, but you need an external Player to watch the content, which can be goof for some people, but I like the webUI of TubeArchivist (even though it can be enhanced for sure)

shaarli bookmarks + hecat (shaarli_api importer + download_media/archive_webpages processors + html_table exporter for the HTML index)

Linkding/Linkwarden

Flash drives and periodic transfers.

Monolith can be particularly handy for this. I used it in a recent project to archive the outgoing links from my own site. Coincidentally, if anyone is interested in that, it's called django-cool-urls.

38 comments