Archive Program Initiatives
Our Approach
As today’s vital code becomes yesterday’s historical curiosity, it may be abandoned, forgotten, or lost. Worse, albeit much less likely, in the case of global catastrophe, we could lose everything stored on modern media in a few generations. Archiving software across multiple organizations and forms of storage helps to ensure its long-term preservation.
The Arctic Code Vault
On 02/02/2020 GitHub captured a snapshot of every active public repository. Those millions of repos were then archived to hardened film designed to last for 1,000 years, and stored in the GitHub Arctic Code Vault in a decommissioned coal mine deep beneath an Arctic mountain in Svalbard, Norway.
Partners and Advisors
Our partners include the Long Now Foundation, Software Heritage, the Internet Archive, Microsoft Research’s Project Silica, the Arctic World Archive, GHTorrent, and GHArchive. Our advisors include both technological visionaries and world-renowned experts in the humanities.
Our Mission
Preserve open source software for future generations.
The GitHub Archive Program is a testament to the importance of the open source community. It is our hope that it will, both now and in the future, further publicize the worldwide open source movement; contribute to greater adoption of open source and open data policies worldwide; and encourage long-term thinking.