A Team of Volunteers Is Archiving #SoundCloud in Case it Dies
▻https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3d4x8/archive-team-soundcloud
Spurred by recent reports the German streaming music and audio company may be running out of cash, The Archive Team is racing to preserve sound files—at high cost.
Scott estimates SoundCloud’s entire library is 1 petabyte (or 1 million gigabytes) in size. But a page on Amazon’s Web Services solutions site highlights SoundCloud as a case study customer, and says that SoundCloud was storing 2.5 petabytes of data.
“I think that page on Amazon’s AWS page is using old numbers, and they have little initiative to round downwards,” Scott wrote.
Motherboard emailed Amazon’s and SoundCloud’s press addresses to confirm the numbers, but did not receive responses in time for this article’s publication
Either way, we’re talking about a lot of cash. Scott said that at 1 petabyte, it would cost between $1.5 million and $2 million to store all the files for the foreseeable future on server space loaned out from the separate Archive.org, the non-profit organization that manages the Internet Archive (where Scott is also employed). Figuring Scott’s estimate of a cost of $1500 per terabyte to store on Archive.org servers, storing 2.5 petabytes for the foreseeable future would cost $3.75 million.
