Comment by badlibrarian
13 hours ago
No climate control. No backup power. And it's secured by a wireless camera sitting in a potted plant. Bless them, but wow.
13 hours ago
No climate control. No backup power. And it's secured by a wireless camera sitting in a potted plant. Bless them, but wow.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
"Don't be snarky."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
No, really: access to the server racks is solely protected by a battery-operated camera nestled into the fake dirt of a plastic floor plant.
Ok, I'm going to assume that I misinterpreted your comment and that you didn't mean to be snarky!
And a site that's in a notorious earth-quake prone zone. I can only hope that with all the AI craze one of the bigcorp made a deal to take a copy of all data in exchange for providing it as backup if necessary
> In the unlikely, for San Francisco, event that the day is too hot, less-urgent tasks can be delayed, or some of the racks can have their clock rate reduced, disks put into sleep mode, or even be powered down. Redundancy means that the data will be available elsewhere.
So it sounds like they have data in other locations as well, hopefully.
There's a mention on Wikipedia [1] that the Internet Archive maintains international mirror sites in Egypt and the Netherlands, in addition to several domestic sites within North America.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive#Operations
During the recent power outages in San Francisco, the site repeatedly went down. When a troubled individual set the power pole on fire outside their building, the site went down. Happy to give them the benefit of the doubt on data redundancy, but they publicly celebrate that Brewster himself has to bike down and flip switches to get the site back online. They don't even have employee redundancy.
Flaggers—on the occasion that the Internet Archive project collapses, badlibrarian’s name (indicating attitude, not acumen) in addition to their comments history checks out as a “told you so”.
I wish them the best (and support them in ways they're not even aware of). But they really need to get their act together. The public statements and basic stats do not match reality. An actual board and annual reports would be a nice start.