What the Heck Happened to the Archive?

 For more than two decades, I've been an ardent fan of the Internet Archive, aka archive.org. It's been an amazing repository for recordings of live music, public domain literature, vintage video, and other such ephemera. I've always said you have to be careful going in, because you might not find your way back out for quite a long while. I've even used a few selections from the Archive as materials for the classes I teach, but a couple of weeks ago, I got an email from my department chair at work, asking if I could fix a broken link from an item on the Archive. When I went to the site, I found the whole thing was down with no real explanation on the error page, beyond an assurance the condition was temporary. 

 My first thought was that the copyright police had finally caught up with them, since in recent years, an increasing amount of copyrighted material has found its way onto the site, but that was not the case.

On further investigation, it turns out the site had fallen victim to a cyber attack. Things are gradually coming back up now, but as they say, it isn't what it used to be, at least not yet. Administrators say the content is all safe and they're working to strengthen the interface to resist future attacks. I was able to find the missing video my department chair inquired about, but I couldn't get to it from the proverbial front door of the site's homepage. I had to enter the title into a search engine to access it directly. 

Today, 26 October 2024, I was listening to a Phil Lesh and Friends concert on SiriusXM, in observance of the former Grateful Dead bassist's passing yesterday at age 84, and decided to see if it was available on Archive. I was able to go in from the home page and find multiple copies from different tapers, but I couldn't download any of them directly from the Archive site, as has been my habit. Fortunately, I was able to select a torrent for the one I wanted and downloaded it that way.

So, if you're wondering as I was, what the heck happened to the Archive? That's the information I have been able to gather thus far. It looks like we'll just have to be patient for a little while longer as administrators continue working to recover the site and make it more secure, but where there's a will, there's a way to get to what you need.

UPDATE--As of today, 10 November, one can now stream audio and video from the Archive, but direct downloads are still unavailable. Many text resources are still completely unavailable via Archive, but may be accessed through other Web sites such as Project Gutenberg. The only option to download audio and video files is via a torrent, but this hit-and-miss at best. It only works if another user is actively seeding an item. As an experiment, I downloaded torrents for a couple of old radio shows yesterday, but have yet to capture a single byte of data. They just don't get the traffic of, say, a Grateful Dead concert recording. Recovering the entire Archive will doubtless be a lengthy and arduous task. One can hope it will be completed soon, but patience is necessarily the watchword. 

UPDATE--2 January 2025: Earlier today, I downloaded a 1975 Little Feat show from Archive without resorting to using a torrent. While I can't say categorically that the site is now fully operational again, this is a major step forward and a good reason to be optimistic. Happy New Year indeed.