#data archive

And some of you, my beloved friends, have already given your lives to this battle. But we must have more; we must use all the ways that work to hold onto what is known.

The kinds of tools I&'m looking for are:

1. File management and organization software (my& regular system file explorer can do fine, I&'m just wondering if there are better options I&'m missing out on)

2. File hosting that will allow me& to share the archive with others and frequently update it (I&'d like to avoid reuploading the entire project every time I& want to update it, perhaps something I& can just offload my& new finds onto and sort within the gallery UI?)

I& don't mind large amounts of manual sorting, but any options that allow me& to get other people to help with that would be appreciated.

My& current plan is to just download everything on my& own computer, organize it within there, then upload a ZIP on Drive and maybe Archive org. But I&'m lost on how I& would go about updating it. I&... also kind of want to upload it on an image hosting service like Filegarden or Catbox and then create an organized gallery on a very simple paste or even website. But I& worry that it's a very roundabout way of doing it that will make the more tech-literate people cringe.

George Orwell, 1984

Why is the Trump administration deleting archive images?

Diversity, equality, inclusion - for the Trump administration, these are irritating words. A comprehensive deletion campaign is therefore underway in archives. It even affects a historic aircraft - named after a woman called Gay. By Stefan Troendle, SWR, 30.03.2025 18:42

A large-scale deletion campaign is underway in archives in the USA. The background to this is US President Donald Trump's actions against diversity, equality and inclusion - i.e. against women, gays, lesbians or transgender people, against minorities and against the disabled.

The ‘Enola Gay’ was the plane that dropped the world's first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. The plane, named after the pilot's mother, has disappeared from the US government archives, presumably because the term ‘gay’ also means ''homosexual'.

Archive images of indigenous people also affected

According to Zurich-based media scientist Roland Meyer, images of Navajo code talkers were probably also deleted at times. ‘These are the Native Americans who encoded secret messages for the army during the Second World War, simply because of their very special language skills. However, the site was restored online after protests,’ says Meyer.

Against diversity, equality and inclusion

Many photos of black war heroes also disappear and research proposals are scanned for supposedly suspicious terms. It's always about diversity, equality and inclusion.

Media scientist Meyer believes that all sorts of things are also disappearing from government websites. ‘Everything that has anything remotely to do with the visualisation of women, of gays, of black people. In fact, this is an attempt to enforce white male supremacy at all levels and by very radical means.’

How is AI affected?

The purging of archives harbours another danger, says Roland Meyer. It changes the training basis for artificial intelligence, which is already male-dominated.

‘These image generators already have a massive problem with racist and sexist discrimination. They are cliché machines that actually repeat and reinforce stereotypes very strongly.’ Meyer says: ‘If you give the command “Show me a soldier”, he would almost certainly be white.’

‘Data to be saved on foreign servers’

What is unclear is what will temporarily disappear from the websites and what will actually be permanently deleted. Meyer says that the famous Internet Archive database in California is starting to mirror its servers in Canada - for security reasons. He himself is in favour of archives based in Europe.

‘History is being rewritten here, as can also be observed in totalitarian systems. And also the prevention and obstruction of research, the destruction of knowledge. That is terrifying,’ says media scientist Meyer.

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Right now, I have about 2.4 TB used, which means my entire computer’s 2024 was archived in about 2 TB. Based on that usage pattern*, this HDD will hold FOUR years of computer backups before it starts deleting the oldest ones. That so fucking overkill for an iMac I casually use as a home media server. 😭

And to think, the Christmas I bought this, Amazon had the prices wrong for the 16 TB drives, and they were only a few tens of dollars more expensive than the 8 TB ones, so I almost bought a 16 TB drive. If I hadn’t procrastinated buying the thing until the prices changed, I very much would’ve ended up with an HDD which would’ve held EIGHT YEARS of whole-computer backups.

Like, I don’t even remember the files I was messing with eight years ago, let alone want to retrieve one I deleted. That 16 TB drive would’ve kept this iMac backed up for longer than Apple probably plans on keeping it supported on macOS. Like, that would’ve been so overkill.

Dr. Harold Winslow was the last of his team still present, seated at his station in the dimly lit, cavernous vault. A fortress of servers hummed softly around him, each one storing decades of classified data, some of which had never been seen by the public eye. The Data Vault was meant to be secure, impenetrable—an archive of secrets too dangerous for anyone but the highest authorities. But…

Synology, maker of network-attached storage (NAS) devices, will seemingly remove advanced features from its Plus devices that are not using hard drives provided by, or certified by, Synology itself, starting with its 2025 lineup.

A report on the German site HardwareLuxx (translated by Google) and a press release on Synology's German-language website appear to confirm Synology's strategy. The company, which sees "significant benefits" to its "proprietary hard drive solution" (also per Google's translation), will be "expanding [its] integrated ecosystem to the Plus series." For those Plus series models released in 2025, only Synology's own hard drives, and third-party drives certified by Synology, will offer "the full range of functions and support." Synology's release states that it can provide the "highest levels of security and performance, while also offering significantly more efficient support."

Ars has contacted Synology's US offices for comment and will update this post with any response.

There is some chance that this move could be restricted to Germany or just the EU. Maintaining region-specific firmware is possible, if not efficient. Synology has previously rolled out its certified drive requirements for higher-end machines globally.