The non-profit organization Internet Archive suffered a major mishap when a fire broke out at its building in San Francisco. Later, the group appealed for donations to keep the service running.
Internet Archive runs the popular and useful Wayback Machine, which helps you to see how a webpage looked in the past. Wayback Machine has an archive of more than 364 billion webpages.
According to the firefighters, the fire broke out around 3:45am in the single-story Clement Street office (between 12th and Funston avenues), and had quickly spread to an adjacent three-story complex. The firefighters brought the blaze under control by 5am. No injuries were reported and no data was lost in the blaze. However, it has been estimated that the fire has destroyed $600,000 worth of scanning and digitization equipment.
"This episode has reminded us that digitizing and making copies are good strategies for both access and preservation," wrote founder Brewster Kahle on the group's blog.
"We have copies of the data in the Internet Archive in multiple locations, so even if our main building had been involved in the fire we still would not have lost the amazing content we have all worked so hard to collect," he said.
It is believed that the fire resulted in the loss of some instruments as well as materials. It will become clearer after proper assessment of the loss is made.
In 1996 the Internet Archive was found with the intent to store the entire world's digital contents. This included moving images, e-books, music and obviously webpages.
In October 2012, the group announced that it had managed to store 10 million gigabytes of information.
The latest initiative of Internet Archive include the TV News Search and Borrow project. It has already over 495,000 archived broadcast available. You can get these on DVD for free, in case you want to check what your politicians said last election.
Open Library is another project of Internet Archive, which constitutes more than 2 million e-books.
Apart from pleading for donations, which can be done here, the group is looking for some places where it can carry on its scanning process.
