Why doesn't AWS or Google offer to pop it in glacier/S3 or GCS for free for the PR? They both have a huge multiple of that much unused disk - it would cost them effectively nothing beyond inbound bandwidth.
Not to mention, that historically speaking, you cannot trust google to keep this information preserved, or public. Look at what happened to any number of other tools google once offered. TBH, I would like to see funding via a grant from the library of congress towards archive.org.
I'm curious as to how many copies a piece of data is needed to be "safe" in such a flexible unknown as end user/volunteer storage. It's one thing for compute items that can be re-queued for work in a day or two if abandoned... it's another where every copy of a record happens to walk away. Let alone the communications protocol.. this goes way beyond most bigtable implementations.
EDIT: according to comments below, looks like its about 20+ petabytes which is actually a fairly large amount.
> As of October 2012, its collection topped 10 petabytes.
I'd be curious what it's grown to since, but google didn't immediately tell me.
1) They have it sitting unused presently. The nominal cost of providing it would be zero.
2) RRS is fine. So would Glacier be. This reduces costs further.
3) There is significant PR benefit to such a move.
My point was you can't rely on them to keep said data available. Not that they couldn't participate.. but I wouldn't trust anything less than a "Lifetime" (of the company) or a 25 year minimum commitment as anything but transient.
Server amortization costs, future cost calculation planning, depreciation costs, power consumption, etc are all closely calculated and factored into budgets. Just thinking they can support that much data for free and at no cost, or minimal cost because it feels good is naive.
Google is hardly going to abandon cloud storage anytime soon. Google's willingness to release and kill small projects has no rational impact on the reliability of their core services.
Historically speaking, Google helped preserve Usenet archives via Google Groups and digitized library archives via Google Books. Both projects have seen their share of ups and downs, but they're still publicly available.
I wonder what "soon" means in this context. If I wanted to archive anything I would think in the timescale of decades, and that's only for my personal photos and videos.
Arguably moving away from the Google Groups search page and into the general search page but using the site:groups.google.com term is better but now it's really hard to find stuff and it's really hard to search by different parameters.
The point is that, if we're talking about Google's history, they have shown an interest in preserving data. And in regards to the Internet Archive, they'd only be serving as a backup storage provider, not in a frontend role.
This is not to say that Google (or Amazon or Microsoft) should be the only backup provider for the Internet Archive, for example, but it would hardly be a bad thing, as tracker1 suggested, if they cared to donate the resources.
Archive.org has about 22 petabytes of archived material – and growing. Even at AWS Glacier's cold-storage rate of $0.01/GiB per month, that's $220,000/month, $2.64MM a year.
Plus it works the other way around too. I don't think the Internet Archive would want the Amazon liability. Amazon might delete to delete all or some of the data someday for whatever reason.
Oh, wait.