There are thousands of archival sites across the interent today, each with their own purpose, style, and price. The largest being the Internet Archive, best known for the WayBack Machine, a tool that allows you to see how a website looks throughout its time on the internet.
But, platforms like these only archive certain content, and while they are free now, looking into the future, a more decentralized approach to archiving our world could help preserve our history for the better. With each business, organization, and even individuals preserving what they deem important for the future to remember, we could have a larger and more stable library of history.
But, how can the average person archive their local history? Well there are many options out there. Some simple scan and save documents to their own computer, some upload and save files in a Google Drive or DropBox folder, some upload to sites like the Interent Archive and Wikimedia. These are all working and in most cases reliable options. The method that works best for me is having a dedicated storage server that allows me to save and publish the files I archive. Here at Reimann Labs we have even helped a client setup and host an archive that publicly displays decades of product catalogs from their family’s business.
This was just a short post about how I see archiving as a skill that everyone should know about and even help out with. Whatever you can do to preserve our history could prove to be extremely important just a few decades down the line. If you would like to host your own archive on the internet feel free to get in touch with us. We provide affordable storage buckets that allow you to host all the files, videos, and documents you want.
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