ARCHIVE TEAM: A Distributed Preservation of Service Attack

Jason Scott describes how the Archive Team rushes to rescue and preserve user-generated web history before companies delete it.

For the last few years, historian and archivist Jason Scott has been involved with a loose, rogue band of data preservation activists called The Archive Team. As major sites with brand recognition and the work of millions announce short-notice shutdowns of their entire services, including Geocities, Friendster, and Yahoo Video, Archive Team arrives on the scene to duplicate as much as they possibly can for history before all the data is wiped forever. To do this, they have been rude, crude and far outside the spectrum of polite requests to save digital history, and have used a variety of techniques to retrieve and extract data that might have otherwise been unreachable. Come for the rough-and-tumble extraction techniques and teamwork methods, stay for the humor and ranting.