I adore archive.org. I'm worried though it is becoming somewhat of a load bearing element of civilization, given the importance of shared and accurate history. We need redundancy.
~~I'm also worried about the deletion of old pages on archive because new owners of a domain update the robots.txt file to disallow it, which I've heard wipes the entire archive.org history of that domain. I hope that gets addressed.~~
Yeah wait, what? I hope that's incorrect. Updating robots.txt to disallow should only omit content from that point onward... It shouldn't be retroactive. What if there's a new owner of a respective domain, for example?
It isn't, I really wish that instead of wiping DECADES of history; it only applies to content that was archived from the day of the domain's registration. I think this is slightly more reasonable, but I imagine they simply don't have access to such data.
The Internet Archive is not really known for deleting anything. In many different postings across the years, their founder and employees have mentioned items being taken "out" of the wayback machine, not "deleted" out of it. I don't think you have anything to worry about.
It's absolutely essential and irreplaceable for the web archive, and that's why I was pretty angry that you guys decided to pick a fight with the big publishers over "loaning" ebooks that could have gotten the whole site killed.
It was possibly a worthwhile fight for someone to have, but not for the site that hosts the Wayback Machine. Separation of concerns, my friends...
~~I'm also worried about the deletion of old pages on archive because new owners of a domain update the robots.txt file to disallow it, which I've heard wipes the entire archive.org history of that domain. I hope that gets addressed.~~
Edit: this is no longer the case