Community Spotlight: Archive Team

Who are they?

If you’re here right now, chances are you’ve heard of the name “Archive Team” before. They might not be the largest internet archiving group, but they are certainly the most influential.

What do they do?

Save your stuff. You are everyone, from links on ancient forums to news reports people will forget, to music videos on dying platforms. Archive Team mostly focusses on extracting web content, often outsourcing its later distribution to the Internet Archive. If a website is reported to be shutting down some time soon, it’ll only be a matter of time before they catch wind of it.

How do they do it?

For most cases they have a standard solution, which anyone can download, known as the Warrior (2). It works by downloading website contents from a website that might not be able to maintain its content (1) to a virtual machine. This content is then passed to a Tracker (3) server which keeps track of what is collected and what else is to be collected. These are then sent to Servers (4) run by dedicated volunteers from the Archive Team, for temporary storage. The final destination will usually be the Internet Archive (5) once the content goes offline for good.

How do I sign up?

Archive Team is entirely composed of volunteers. Although members maintain a small presence on Twitter and Discord, their main hub is https://archiveteam.org, a wiki where they keep track of ongoing projects and have links to resources such as the aforementioned Warrior. For more “real-time” communication you can find them on the #archiveteam channel on EFnet:
http://chat.efnet.org:9090/?channels=%23archiveteam

Looking to discover other archiving communities? Just follow Data Horde’s Twitter List and check out our other Community Spotlights.