Already, the archivists have stockpiled more than 2 terabytes of the Net, and currently they're storing about 100 gigabytes of data every month. Faster connections to the Net promise to speed things up, and Kahle estimates that his group will be done by the end of 1997. Storing the Internet once is only the beginning. As experienced Web surfers know, things change rapidly on the Net. The archive doesn't have the computer muscle to store the publicly available Internet every week, but even if it did, a lot of stuff would still fall through the cracks.
Slate is updated daily.
Because the information these sites produce is specific to a user's experience, they can generate a literally infinite number of different pages. To archive the Internet with absolute fidelity would require cloning not only every computer on the Internet, but also every person using every computer. Archiving is a no-brainer for publication sites like the San Francisco Chronicle 's The Gate , which collects the contents of the daily newspaper and connects them to a good search engine. And other sites like Deja News already assemble postings from the Internet newsgroups. Where the Internet Archive trumps these archives, of course, is in its sheer comprehensiveness.