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Parts of the internet are disappearing around us – and they might be lost forever

We see the internet as storing vast swathes of information forever – but parts of it are under more threat than we realise, writes Andrew Griffin

The Internet Archive – the most capacious library ever made – is home to 835 billion web pages. A single backup of its library collection requires more than 145 petabytes of space. Increasingly, the web is made up of content that is being both produced and consumed by automated systems: a report last month from cyber security company Imperva said that almost exactly half of all internet traffic came from bots.

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