The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

As David Rosenthal (formerly of Sun, NVIDIA, and Stanford) explains, the actual Arctic Code Vault is a PR stunt, and has almost no chance of helping anyone in any kind of realistic disaster scenario: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.dshr.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;seeds-or-code.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.dshr.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;seeds-or-code.html</a><p>That said, the <i>rest</i> of the project, which focuses on preserving several independent copies of repositories hosted on GitHub with a handful of partner organizations, is quite useful. From the same post: &quot;They are using a range of technologies, making feeds available over the Internet, and partnering with the Internet Archive, the Software Heritage Foundation and the Bodleian Library. These are mostly things which will get used in the foreseeable future, and should be applauded for that reason.&quot;

Honestly, for however much this project either (a) is a genuine archeological move for the preservation of information or (b) to get good press, all I genuinely thought when this happened is &quot;aw shucks - wish i fixed those bugs before they zapped it onto film and flew it to santa clause&quot;.

Beautiful.<p>Honestly, nothing scares me more than losing all the code and all the technology we&#x27;ve developed in the past 70 or so years. There&#x27;s been so much advancement, but it&#x27;s also transferred in such a way (institutional knowledge, propietary software, proprietary hardware, etc.) that it&#x27;s super easy to lose. If we preserve open hardware and software, then we could rebuild in the case of civilizational decline and the accompanying knowledge loss, something which we would neither be the first nor the last to experience.

&gt; The Internet Archive is a well-known, widely beloved non-profit digital library which provides free public access to collections of digitized materials. In partnership with the GitHub Archive Program, the Internet Archive (IA) commenced its ongoing archive of GitHub public repositories on April 13 of this year. At present, IA is using a two-pronged approach. First, their well-known Wayback Machine is accessing and archiving raw GitHub data as WARCs, or Web ARChive files. As of this writing they have archived some 55TB of data. Second, they have the goal of making entire archived GitHub repositories available via “git clone,” while also keeping repo comments, issues, and other metadata easily accessible on the web. This second initiative is well underway and initial archiving is expected to commence this month.<p>Tremendous news.

This means that after the apocalypse people will be able to reclaim the Linux source code but not Windows. I find it poetic that open source may one day be the norm.

This is so awesome, but the most surprising to me is that all the public source code on GitHub only totals 21 TB.<p>I forget that they do fundamentally host text, and not video etc.<p>I somehow thought it would be petabytes. The private repos might be more than that but those are historically paid.

Am I the only one thinking this is a waste of money and time?! How any of this makes sense, maybe as a weird PR stunt but ... Just strange

Where can we find the list of the 6000 repos ? On my profile it just shows 3 &quot;and more&quot;, would like to get the full list. TYIA ;)

What I really want from github is to allow people who own open source projects who don&#x27;t want to own them anymore to just hand them off for escrow so that at a later date a reputable group like apache can maintain them if needed.

I&#x27;m curious, do they perform some sort of test reads on the reels to make sure that the data was actually copied over correctly?

What stops this stored data degrading? Do they have to periodically check &#x2F; renewal the reels?

I was hoping for more of a description on how they plan to keep this vault safer than the Global Seed Vault, which was once flooded due to soaring arctic temperatures: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;environment&#x2F;2017&#x2F;may&#x2F;19&#x2F;arctic-stronghold-of-worlds-seeds-flooded-after-permafrost-melts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;environment&#x2F;2017&#x2F;may&#x2F;19&#x2F;arctic-s...</a>

It looks like the code is actually stored in plain text, and that this is basically microfilm?

Strong A Fire Upon the Deep vibes thinking of future archeologists studying that.

&gt; The next morning, it traveled to the decommissioned coal mine set in the mountain, and then to a chamber deep inside hundreds of meters of permafrost, where the code now resides fulfilling their mission of preserving the world’s open source code for over 1,000 years.<p>What is the probability that we still have the required tech to read that code in 1,000 years?

They __are not__ using QR code for storage as has been misreported by a few media outlets.<p>See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;earth.esa.int&#x2F;documents&#x2F;1656065&#x2F;3222865&#x2F;170922-Piql-ESA_Slides-Final" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;earth.esa.int&#x2F;documents&#x2F;1656065&#x2F;3222865&#x2F;170922-Piql-...</a> for piql&#x27;s storage method.

Ice. Not to be confused with ICE.

Only disappointed that the new badge does not show the 2 open source projects I contributed to in the last 10 years of my work for open source :( They are not super big, but also not super small.<p>Seems organisation work is ignored and only individual username fork&#x2F;PRs respected (is this a bug?). Software is teamwork ;)<p>I mean awesome-react, tldr-pages or homebrew-cask are probably not unimportant but that&#x27;s not where I contributed most to.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;5D_optical_data_storage" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;5D_optical_data_storage</a>

1000 years from now, I can only imagine the hidden Y3K bugs...

If things come to that I doubt the practicality of it all. But it makes easy headlines. It also makes open source an immortality project for a lot of people.

Ha, that README grammar fix years ago finally pays off!

In a 1000 years people will surely benefit from the millions of copy-pasted dotfiles :^)

This is a waste of money.

So, if I&#x27;m in the EU can I GDPR my repo out of their vault?

This is pointless - a complete waste of time, effort, and energy. Isn’t there something more beneficial they could have done instead? Why pollute the Arctic with plastic and film canisters?