The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

I was hoping for more of a description on how they plan to keep this vault safer than the Global Seed Vault, which was once flooded due to soaring arctic temperatures: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/19/arctic-s...

> The Internet Archive is a well-known, widely beloved non-profit digital library which provides free public access to collections of digitized materials. In partnership with the GitHub Archive Program, the Internet Archive (IA) commenced its ongoing archive of GitHub public repositories on April 13 of this year. At present, IA is using a two-pronged approach. First, their well-known Wayback Machine is accessing and archiving raw GitHub data as WARCs, or Web ARChive files. As of this writing they have archived some 55TB of data. Second, they have the goal of making entire archived GitHub repositories available via “git clone,” while also keeping repo comments, issues, and other metadata easily accessible on the web. This second initiative is well underway and initial archiving is expected to commence this month.

Tremendous news.

Beautiful.

Honestly, nothing scares me more than losing all the code and all the technology we've developed in the past 70 or so years. There's been so much advancement, but it's also transferred in such a way (institutional knowledge, propietary software, proprietary hardware, etc.) that it's super easy to lose. If we preserve open hardware and software, then we could rebuild in the case of civilizational decline and the accompanying knowledge loss, something which we would neither be the first nor the last to experience.

Am I the only one thinking this is a waste of money and time?! How any of this makes sense, maybe as a weird PR stunt but ... Just strange

well in 25 years when the remains of global civilization are pulling the backups out of the ground, maybe you will think otherwise. /s

kinda with you on that one. looks cool, plausibly useful but we'll see.