The race to save our online lives from a digital dark age

Digital archivists are racing to save online material that could otherwise vanish, since data is easier to wipe than books and is more fragile than ever. Jason Scott's volunteer group, Archive Team, downloaded millions of GeoCities pages in 2009 before Yahoo closed the site, saving around a terabyte of a site that peaked at about nine terabytes. The Internet Archive, founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle, has collected more than 145 petabytes, and its Wayback Machine stores more than 800 billion web pages. Researchers such as Mahadev Satyanarayanan at Carnegie Mellon are also working on ways to keep old file formats readable.