That would mean that even with a million volunteer drives storing a file, you still wouldn't be able to depend on them, which is plainly wrong.

> Also the average value of data is very low, you don't want to be making many copies of for no reason.

The reason is that the value of that data is high to the archivist, since they want to preserve it.

A million is out of the parameters of the case.

Realistically you won't get enough volunteer-storage to cover one IA. And even if you did, it wouldn't satisfy the mission requirements, which is to store reliably for decades all of the data.

This isn't meant to be storage for IA, it's meant to be a distributed backup.

Ah my bad, so it's not a replacement of IA. In that case it makes sense

Yes, the idea is that this is a replacement for the torrents they make public. In case the IA goes away, we'll have this distributed dataset to fall back on.

An archive of an archive