Fire at Internet Archive Causes $600,000 Damage

Posted by at 1:29 pm on November 7, 2013

 Internet Archive LogoA fire at a building owned by the Internet Archive, the non-profit behind the Wayback Machine, has caused an estimated $600,000 of damage. The organization’s scanning center in San Francisco caught fire at 3:30am, and while no-one was hurt nor any data lost by the incident, the building and equipment used for scanning and digitization were all damaged.

The main building was relatively unaffected by the fire, according to the Archive’s blog, though some servers endured a loss of power. A majority of materials due to be scanned were saved in either a separate locked room or in a physical archive, and though items in the fire-affected area are lost, around half of the materials had already been scanned.

The archive is now asking for donations to help replace the digitization equipment, as well as to repair the scanning building. It is also requesting assistance with continuing its scanning efforts at an alternative location while repairs and replacement equipment can be acquired.

Founded in 1996, the Internet Archive aims to collect texts, audio, moving images, software, and archived web pages, and in October last year, revealed that it had stored a total of 10 petabytes of data.

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