Report: “A Crucial Internet Archive Backup is Hiding in Downtown Vancouver”

From The Logic:

“Lots of copies keep stuff safe,” says Brewster Kahle, co-founder and director of the Internet Archive. Kahle is sitting in the lobby of The Permanent, a high-end event space in downtown Vancouver, that’s also the unlikely location of two of the Internet Archive’s several Canadian servers. Kahle gestures to the balcony above him, where the lights on the servers are blinking with activity. “People are using those machines right now,” he says.

In fact, people are using them more than ever. Internet Archive Canada may have launched back in 2006, but its importance really became evident shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump’s first election win in 2016. Back then, prompted by fears of the incoming administration’s very real threats to internet freedoms, the organization realized it was crucial to have backups outside of the U.S. This inspired the Internet Archive Canada to open its own data centres, which went online six years later. Now, with Trump’s second term well underway, his administration’s slash-and-burn approach is presenting Kahle and his colleagues with even bigger challenges.

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Its work in Canada is all about redundancy. Having an archive of the internet in one country is all well and good, but when that country’s government behaves erratically, it’s crucial to have a backup of the backup. Right now, all of the Internet Archive’s Canadian servers are located in B.C.—there are two in downtown Vancouver, along with several more at the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island, as well as at an undisclosed third location elsewhere in the province.

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