Interplanetary Wayback: The permanent web archive

Abstract

To facilitate permanence and collaboration in web archives, we built Interplanetary Wayback to disseminate the contents of WARC files into the IPFS network. IPFS is a peer-to-peer content-addressable file system that inherently allows deduplication and facilitates opt-in replication. We split the header and payload of WARC response records before disseminating into IPFS to leverage the deduplication, build a CDXJ index, and combine them at the time of replay. From a 1.0 GB sample Archive-It collection of WARCs containing 21,994 mementos, we found that on an average, 570 files can be indexed and disseminated into IPFS per minute. We also found that in our naive prototype implementation, replay took on an average 370 milliseconds per request.