What’s the significance of the Archive’s collections?
Societies have always placed importance on preserving their culture and heritage. But much early 20th-century media — television and radio, for example — was not saved. The Library of Alexandria — an ancient center of learning containing a copy of every book in the world — disappeared when it was burned to the ground.
What are your fees?
At this time we have no fees for uploading and preserving materials. We estimate that permanent storage costs us approximately $2.00US per gigabyte. While there are no fees we always appreciate donations to offset these costs.
Do you backup my files?
Yes. We duplicate/backup all files at various locations
How long will you store files?
As an archive our intention is to store and make materials in perpetuity.
What languages are supported by Archive.org?
Archive.org supports all metadata about items in just about any language so long as the characters are UTF8 encoded.
What is a “view”?
A “view” used to be called a “download” on archive.org. How are “views” counted?
archive.org calculates a view as: one action (read a book, download a file, watch a movie, etc.), per day, per IP Address. So, for each item page, using multiple files or accessing from multiple accounts in a single day will only count as one view.
How often are views counted?
Item pages are updated daily so the current number would reflect the count through the previous day. Collection counts shown in the graph on the “About” page are updated monthly.
What is GDPR?
The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) builds upon and modernizes existing EU Data Protection and Privacy rules. We operate under a terms of service, copyright policy and privacy policy, that are available here. Please read these.
As a library, the Internet Archive has, in the words of the GDPR, a “legitimate interest” in building collections, providing permanent public access, and maintaining archival integrity.
In general, the Internet Archive, well, archives digital and physical materials that we collect ourselves or is contributed by users based on their uses of our services. This includes collecting available provenance information such as uploader and dates. We try to keep everything forever and try to make everything available publicly, and if not publicly, then at least to researchers, historians, and scholars. That is how we see our job.
Updating, deleting, and exporting account information is available to each user, not limited to residents of the EU. If you have uploaded things to the Internet Archive, you can find a list of them from the “my library” link on your settings page. From there, you can download the items and take them anywhere.
We use limited automated techniques to reduce spam and limit damage to our services. We hope to increase these in the future. Users that object may write to info@archive.org.
Our collections reside on servers in many locations in order to keep them safe, and data may be processed outside of the European Economic Area.