ARCHIVE.ORG GLOBAL MIRRORS I'm guessing that readers of this will be aware of the Internet Archive, and their wonderful Wayback Machine service providing access to web content archived since 1996. It's wonderful because so much information is lost from the web due to lack of funds, interest, or even hardware failures and major oops moments at the keyboard. Some might notice though that the archived data itself actually has few protections should the worst happen and the Internet Archive itslef fail to sustain their collected data. There is apparantly a mirror of the Wayback Machine archive in Egypt: http://www.bibalex.org/en/project/details?documentid=283 And a mirror of something is claimed to live in Amsterdam, though I can't find an official webpage about it. Back in 2016 they made some big ripples in the media by announcing plans for a Canadian mirror, said to be motivated significantly by the election of Donald Trump and foreseen internet freedom armageddon. https://blog.archive.org/2016/11/29/help-us-keep-the-archive-free-accessible-and-private/ Nothing seems to have happened with that, but nor does Trump seem to have taken much interest in internet censorship, so it looks like that was just hot air coming from both sides: https://blog.archive.org/?s=canada But while the Internet Archive's data rests mainly on crossed fingers, terabytes are being sucked constantly into other archives, many run by government programmes for preserving data only generated within their own borders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Web_archiving_initiatives gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/List%20of%20Web%20archiving%20initiatives - The tables don't really work on Gopherpedia though. The same organisations might also hold media such as texts, images, and films, that are not available freely online (I'm looking mainly at the Australian ones here) except as library catalog entries. Here in Australia, as in many other countries, the copyright on items has expired before it will in the USA. Lots of material might be removed from the Internet Archive in the US due to a breach of copyright, even if in other countries this copyright has expired. Here in Aus this applies to many items published before 1954, as well as some other content such as television broadcast more than sixty years ago. Presumably all of these individual archiving projects cost governments a significant amount to run, and are unlikely to be as accurate and reliable as the Wayback Machine archive. I think it would make more sense to concentrate these funds towards keeping complete mirrors of the Internet Archive around the globe, with local operators also ensuring that any local content being overlooked by IA is included, and that content not able to be legally hosted in the USA can be available to a local audience where it is out of copyright. Project Gutenburg Australia is an example of making out-of-copyright texts available within Australa: http://gutenberg.net.au/ Now the technology allows for images and films to be practically accessed over the web. Where is the equivalent project for these mediums? At the same time the PANDORA archive has been keeping hold of Australian web pages for as long as the internet archive (argh, and now moved over to a site that won't work without Javascript it seems! The future will get you one way or other): http://pandora.nla.gov.au/ Surely this archive could be merged with the Wayback Machine and instead of the efforts put into a secondary archiving effort, work could be put into expanding the storage to allow the complete Internet Archive content to be mirrored, along with Project Gutenburg Australia and new projects for images, sound, and video. Granted it might not be practical, or wise, to fund this entirely from the government. However combined with private donations it might be feasible. It should get decent exposure here in Aus if it is possible for content to be streamed similarly to existing services (including the government-funded ABC iView), because a huge number of old movies are out of copyright here but currently can't be downloaded except via services set up for video piracy. Hopefully the advantage to keeping global mirrors would encourage donations from foreign shores as well. Ideally a single fund for worldwide Internet Archive mirrors could be distributed to operations in different countries around the globe. Internet Archive Australia, Internet Archive Europe, Internet Archive Japan. etc. The funds just need to be redirected from these assorted independent archiving projects to create something more useful to both a local and a global audience. - The Free Thinker, 2020.