Archives

These archived pages of Transfigure Photograph are important time records. Preserving our archived heritage is a necessary labour. Because the texts, photos, drawings, videos and other data that we share is a continuous stream on the Net which is part of a bigger picture.

The Internet is celebrating its thirtieth birthday, since its creation in 1989 by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, and trillions of websites are out there serving a purpose of sorts, but wow do we keep these memories? And how is this archiving done? Is everything preserved?

What does “archiving” pages really mean?

Transfigure Photography Internet Archives has developed a system for collecting snapshots, which is roughly equivalent to capturing web pages that we want to freeze.

Is everything preserved?

No, even if the goal is to archive as many things as possible. First of all, because the collection of the entirety of the data put on line by Transfigure photography, would be logistically impossible, as my hosts would be asking for huge sums for additional storage and this would become problematic, frankly. Transfigure Photography scans its Web pages every two months, and only photographs them a few clicks deep.

How is this collection done?

We have all heard of indexing robots. They are among the programs that make search engines work. In order to best perform their collection work, it is possible to give them instructions (for example, to capture only image files or to explore only part of a site) thanks to small files named robots.txt . Thus, they wander from page to page, instructions in hand, looking for new content, including pages already visited and updated.

Where are these data kept?

Physically speaking, Internet Archive files are stored in systems manufactured by Capricorn Technologies, Petabox Racks. As a precautionary measure, the organization maintains a real-time updated copy of the archive at the Library of Alexandria, Egypt.

How to consult them?

In order to immerse itself in millions of “digital photo albums”, Internet Archive has developed a kind of time machine. Nicknamed the “Wayback Machine” It is basically the tool that allows you to browse for free through the 450 billion web pages archived since 1996.

https://archive.org/web/