Data Hoarders Rush to Save Vanishing U.S. Federal Websites!

In a recent move, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order leading to the removal of numerous webpages and entire sites from government platforms. This action has sparked a widespread effort among digital preservationists to secure these resources before they disappear. According to MuckRock, a collaborative group known as the End of Term Archive—which includes partners like the Internet Archive, Stanford University, Common Crawl Foundation, University of North Texas, and Webrecorder—has already archived more than 500 terabytes of data from .gov domains.

Reports indicate that over 8,000 government pages have been eliminated. This includes a Department of Justice database that tracked the criminal proceedings of the January 6 rioters, resources related to LGBTQ+ rights and HIV information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool developed by the Council on Environmental Quality, among other significant deletions.

As a response, the r/DataHoarder Subreddit, which boasts over 832,000 members, has become a hub for coordination. The group is actively working to archive threatened data. A notable participant, u/didyousayboop, posted that the Archive Team, a group of volunteer digital archivists led by Jason Scott—an archivist and Software Curator at the Internet Archive—is seeking assistance for their US Government project. This project is dedicated to preserving government content at risk of removal under the current administration.

Within the r/DataHoarder community, there are numerous calls to action to support the archiving of specific government pages and websites. High-priority sites include NOAA, USAID, the National Center for Education Statistics, the National HIV Curriculum, and CDC Immunization Publications. There was even a plea for assistance in downloading videos from USAID’s YouTube channel after its website was taken offline, raising concerns about the future accessibility of these videos.

Beyond just backing up data, there is a strong volunteer movement to host the preserved sites on personal domains at no charge. This initiative represents one of the largest drives to archive data, with a passionate community of storage enthusiasts leading the charge to download and safeguard significant historical online data.

If you are interested in joining this critical effort to help preserve information from government servers, you can find detailed instructions posted by u/didyousayboop on the r/DataHoarder subreddit.