PSA: Internet Archive "glitch" deletes years of user data and accounts

Re:PSA: Internet Archive "glitch" deletes years of user data... by msephton on Thursday August 01, 2024 @05:37PM (#41133907)

Are you sure that you can download metadata? Favorites, lists, posts, reviews, collections, and web archives? I don't think it's possible. Even saving the HTML of the page is tricky because the site renders the content using JavaScript.

Of course you can download your own uploads, but it's likely you have them in your local backups already if you uploaded them?

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Re:PSA: Internet Archive "glitch" deletes years of user data... by toomuchtodo on Thursday August 01, 2024 @07:04PM (#41134556)

https://github.com/Ghosty-Tongue/IA-Account-Backup appears to support bulk downloading items associated with a user account. More to come in this regard.

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Re:PSA: Internet Archive "glitch" deletes years of user data... by msephton on Friday August 02, 2024 @10:05AM (#41138883)

Interestingly, this was created as a reaction to the data loss. A small silver lining, I suppose.

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Re:PSA: Internet Archive "glitch" deletes years of user data... by nosamu on Monday August 05, 2024 @11:27PM (#41167543)

I took a look at this script and you can do the same thing it does with the ia command line tool (`pip install internetarchive` is the easiest way to get it)

ia download --search uploader:[email protected]

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Re:PSA: Internet Archive "glitch" deletes years of user data... by hcs on Thursday August 01, 2024 @06:50PM (#41134462)

> Of course you can download your own uploads, but it's likely you have them in your local backups already as you uploaded them?

Sadly many do not keep copies, so it is worth the PSA. IA is not a substitute for backups, at best it is one more backup location. I try to treat it as a way of publishing what would otherwise be stuck in some free upload service waiting to auto-expire.

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Re:PSA: Internet Archive "glitch" deletes years of user data... by msephton on Friday August 02, 2024 @07:45AM (#41138026)

Right, but the issue in the OP is that it's the data other than the uploads that has been deleted and not being restored.

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Re:PSA: Internet Archive "glitch" deletes years of user data... by nosamu on Friday August 02, 2024 @03:09AM (#41136760)

I found that it's possible to download an account's Web Archives list as a json file, for example: https://archive.org/download/@brewster/@brewster_web-archive...

User accounts have other json files such as _mylists.json, but they are access-restricted and cannot be downloaded, unfortunately.

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Re:PSA: Internet Archive "glitch" deletes years of user data... by msephton on Friday August 02, 2024 @07:48AM (#41138046)

That's seems to be an index, but there's no content? How does it map to content? For example, how can I see the tweet or website from those points in time?

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Re:PSA: Internet Archive "glitch" deletes years of user data... by toomuchtodo on Friday August 02, 2024 @09:07AM (#41138558)

https://web.archive.org/

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Re:PSA: Internet Archive "glitch" deletes years of user data... by msephton on Friday August 02, 2024 @10:06AM (#41138896)

That's good! I can confirm that this JSON does not exist for the deleted account, so it would need restoring from their backup.

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