from Hacker News

Internet Archive's S.F. office damaged in fire

by louhong on 11/6/13, 7:20 PM with 18 comments

• by sillysaurus2 on 11/6/13, 8:55 PM

  Let me second this sentiment: YAY!

  My stomach dropped when I heard the news. I was so relieved to see that archive.org still loads, and to hear that there was no data loss. It's become a ridiculously irreplaceable tool in my daily workflow.

  You found an interesting tutorial/article/paper written in 1995 but it fails to load when you follow the URL? Internet archive that shiz.

  An author has edited his webpage, and you're curious what it used to look like? Internet archive that shiz.

  Have a PDF link, but it's not loading? Check the archive. More often than not, it will load.

  If I remember correctly, I once recovered a ~1MB zip file from there as well. The zip file had disappeared from the normal web, but thankfully archive had snagged it. Maybe it was a PDF though.

  It seems impossible for the internet archive to persist forever... But it also seems about as valuable as the Library of Alexandria was in its day. Or rather, future historians will find it as valuable. So I hope we can get triple redundancy for it.

• by IvyMike on 11/6/13, 9:12 PM

  If you've ever considered donating, today would be a good day.

  https://archive.org/donate/

  I just did for the first time.

  Edit: The site appears to be overloaded, so if you have trouble donating, please try again later.

• by drtse4 on 11/6/13, 7:59 PM

  Didn't knew where the central office was until a few weeks ago, here is a nicely done documentary that shows what's inside the former church that now hosts the internet archive: http://vimeo.com/groups/17441/videos/59207751

• by ToastyMallows on 11/6/13, 7:56 PM

  > The fire is not believed to have caused major disruption to the website. No data were stored at the San Francisco site.

  Yay!

  EDIT: Also glad no one was injured.

• by _delirium on 11/6/13, 8:14 PM

  More detailed story, with some photos and video: http://richmondsfblog.com/2013/11/06/part-of-internet-archiv...

• by sp332 on 11/6/13, 8:02 PM

  Here's a picture of what's left of the office: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BYZUtBdCUAAW6ey.jpg:large and another https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BYZzCHYCAAA-WGA.jpg:large These are apparently from @hollyquan of KCBS News.

  Edit: originally said "building" but it was just one of the offices in the building.

• by schenecstasy on 11/6/13, 9:54 PM

  They don't have a backup office?