That was also the "end of an era" of sorts right there.-
> they don't encourage mirror sites to emerge,
Something over BitTorrent or blockchain would work well here, methinks. As a baseline substrate.-
Heck, existing paper-based libraries should probably each include a digital archiving department.
Maybe this is already happening or already exists, and is trivial to those studying library science or something. I can hope, anyway.
Local neighborhood libraries could have their own curated digital archive, as cache for fast local search, and archival backup for long-term resilience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Web_archiving_initiati...
But the web is large. And public sector or academic librarian teams tend to be small. The IA's the one that people have coalesced around.
Or somebody accidentally `rm -rf`'s an empty variable. Or The Big One hits San Fran. Or somebody in crisis breaks in with a crowbar, matchbook, and jug of gasoline.
They're a rather old-school shop. Own their own servers, all in one location I think. Bare metal admin stuff, and data's only mirrored across two disks per file IIRC. Keeps costs down. It's what makes the whole operation possible. But I also wonder sometimes.
I still appreciate it, but just imagine if it goes down due to a lawsuit. Now that Google no longer shows cached results, an entire historical record would be gone.