#data archival

For anyone who's looking for an easy way to help resistance efforts in the US, ArchiveTeam, a volunteer-based web archival effort, is currently running an urgent short-term project for US government sites. You can help preserve valuable online resources that are in danger of deletion by volunteering just a small amount of your PC's CPU, memory, and bandwidth!

Details on how to get started are available on the ArchiveTeam wiki:

You'll need a copy of the ArchiveTeam Warrior appliance, as well as a virtual machine to run it in (I recommend VirtualBox). Links to download both of these can be found at the above link under the "Basic usage (virtual machine)" heading.

Once you've downloaded the required components, follow the instructions under "Installing and running with VirtualBox". After starting the appliance and opening the web UI, you'll be able to select "US Government" from the list of available projects.

If you're a more advanced user, instructions are also available for running the appliance directly in a container (i.e. Docker). Note that you'll need a little bit of disk space to temporarily store whatever content is being archived, so you probably want to make sure that any computer you run this on has at least a few gigs of free storage.

There is currently a concerted effort by four of our largest publishing companies in the US and backed by many other smaller publishing companies to prevent the lending of archived media. https://help.archive.org/help/why-are-so-many-books-listed-as-borrow-unavailable-at-the-internet-archive/

An attack on archival certainly sets up precedent for further legal assaults on our already struggling library system. If this is of concern to you, please contact your representatives and make it be known.

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