If anyone knows how to preserve data and information for long term value, it’s the programmers at Internet Archive, based in San Francisco, CA. In fact, Internet Archive is attempting to capture every webpage, video, television show, MP3 file, or DVD published anywhere in the world. If Internet Archive is seeking to keep and preserve data for centuries, what can we learn from this non-profit about architecting a solution to keep our own data safeguarded and accessible long-term?
Long term horizon by Irargerich. Courtesy of Flickr.
There’s a fascinating 13-minute documentary on the work of data curators at the Internet Archive. The mission of the Internet Archive is “universal access to all data”. In their efforts to crawl every webpage, scan every book, and make information available to any citizen of the world, the Internet Archive team has designed a system that is resilient, redundant, and highly available.
Preserving knowledge for generations is no easy task. Key components of this massive undertaking include decisions in technology, architecture, data storage, and data accessibility.
First, just about every technology used by Internet Archive, is either open source software or commodity hardware. For web crawling and adding content to their digital archives Heritrix was developed by Internet Archive. To enable full text search on Internet Archive’s website, Nutch running on Hadoop’s file system is utilized to “allow Google-style full-text search of web content, including the same content as it changes over time.” There are also web sites that mention HBase could also be in the mix as a database technology.
Second, the concepts of redundancy and disaster planning are baked into the overall Internet Archive architecture. The non-profit has servers located in San Francisco, but in keeping a multi-century and beyond vision, Internet Archive mirrors data in Amsterdam and Egypt to weather the volatility of historical events.
Third, many companies struggle to decide what data they should use, archive, or throw away. However with the plummeting cost of hard disk storage, and open source Hadoop, capturing and storing all data in perpetuity is more feasible than ever. For Internet Archive all data are captured and nothing is thrown away.
Finally, it’s one thing to capture and store data, and another to make it accessible. Internet Archive aims to make the world’s knowledge base available to everyone. On the Internet Archive site, users can search and browse through ancient documents, view recorded video from years past and listen to music from artists that no longer walk planet earth. Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive says, that with a simple internet connection; “A poor kid in Keyna or Kansas can have access to…great works no matter where they are, or when they were (composed).”
Capturing a mountain of multi-structured data (currently 10 petabytes and growing) is an admirable feat, however the real magic lies in Internet Archive’s multi-century vision of making sure the world’s best and most useful knowledge is preserved. Political systems come and go, but with Internet Archive’s Big Data preservation approach, the treasures of the world’s digital content will hopefully exist for centuries to come.
