Internet Archive BitTorrents

Storage · 1 record · JSON

Internet Archive BitTorrents (webseed swarm) Storage

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archive.org/details/torrents · p2p · storage/internet-archive-bittorrents · JSON · compare

Free tier	Free, unlimited distribution; ~1.4 million items already torrented, 'comprising almost a petabyte of public domain materials'. Egress is unbounded because the swarm and webseeds share the load. unit unlimited; metered on unstated
Price	none stated
Per-object cap	not stated
Retention	not stated
Egress	Free — 'our Torrents rely heavily on webseeding (download directly from our servers, when no peers have the files you are seeking)'. Peers carry the rest at zero cost to anyone.
Identity	email (placeholder) not published
Binding	none no constraint in the record binds at this scale; the record carries no limit of a kind the vocabulary names
Interface	rest, rclone rest
Tooling	Any BitTorrent client with Getright-style webseed support (qBittorrent, Transmission); IA generates the .torrent per item and runs trackers bt1.archive.org; rclone not involved
Composes with	Combine with #1: upload once via IAS3, then distribute via torrent so a 1TiB/day fetch load is carried by peers + webseed instead of a single HTTP stream. Torrent + webseed is also the only path that can exceed the ~1.7 MB/s per-connection shaping.
Reliability	Old torrents for a mutated item loop forever re-downloading mismatched pieces; seeder counts are cached ~5 minutes and include webseeds.
Notes	Free, unlimited distribution; ~1.4 million items already torrented, 'comprising almost a petabyte of public domain materials'. Egress is unbounded because the swarm and webseeds share the load.
Evidence rung	reported One page read moves it to documented.
Checked	2026-10-21 (inherited); stale on 2026-11-04

Evidence (3)

date	source	what it proved
2026-10-21	help.archive.org/help/archive-bittorrents/	(snapshot 2026-09-13) — 'over 1.4 million Archive Items are available via the BitTorrent protocol, comprising almost a petabyte'
2026-10-21	help.archive.org/help/archive-bittorrents/	'Our Torrents rely heavily on webseeding ... rTorrent do not support Getright-style webseeding'
2026-10-21	help.archive.org/help/archive-bittorrents/	torrents for changed items 'become obsolete ... files will fail to download completely'

Unknown or withheld values (7)

$.free_tier.notes process
$.identity_cost.detail defaulted
$.identity_cost.kind identity-defaulted
$.per_object_cap.notes not-extracted
$.per_object_cap.stated not-extracted
$.retention.notes not-extracted
$.retention.stated not-extracted

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