BA-IA – The Bibliotheca Alexandrina Internet Archive

 

The BA has been operating a large-scale storage cluster since 2002. This is commonly known as the Bibliotheca Alexandrina Internet Archive, initially established in a collaborative effort with the San Francisco-based Internet Archive for hosting a comprehensive archive of webpages that allows users of the archive to navigate the web of the past, going back all the way to 1996. Today, while this large-scale storage cluster continues to serve the purpose of hosting the BA web archive, it has also become home to other collections, most notably material digitized at the BA. The cluster is constructed out of commodity hardware, runs all open-source software, and has seen multiple upgrades over the years, growing from the initial 100 TB in 2002 to the current total capacity of 5.2 PB. Technical details are provided in the table below.

Administrative data

System Name	BA-IA
Short Description	The Bibliotheca Alexandrina Internet Archive
Owner	Bibliotheca Alexandrina
Country	Egypt

Storage system

Description of storage systems	Internet Archive “Petabox”
Total storage	5.2 PB

Integration

System operational since	2014
Available to the project from	PM04
Expected date to be phased out	-
Interfaces	SFTP access

Dedication to VI-SEEM

Dedication % of available storage	2%
Dedication storage in TB	100 TB