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Video has emerged of GitHub's extraordinary frozen archive project: Millions of projects were saved on 02/02/2020 and there's a good reason why that date was chosen.

Video has emerged of GitHub's extraordinary frozen archive project: Millions of projects were saved on 02/02/2020 and there's a good reason why that date was chosen.

The idea of preserving the Earth's most essential elements to keep them safe in the event of a catastrophe is not new: the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, for example, serves as a backup for more than a million seeds to prevent their extinction.

Not far from there is another crucial support: the Arctic World Archive (AWA), a joint initiative between the Norwegian state mining company Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani (SNSK) and the very long-term digital preservation provider Piql AS.

The AWA is a collection of containers filled with data stored inside a sealed chamber inside a decommissioned coal mine, about 250 to 300 meters underground. These containers look like film reels, except they are filled with data, not film.

A lucky date

On 02/02/2020, GitHub captured a snapshot of each active public repository and persisted that data in the Arctic Code Vault within AWA.

This screenshot includes each repository with any commits between the GitHub Universe announcement on November 13, 2019 and 02/02/2020; each repository with at least 1 star and any commits from the year before the snapshot. As well as all repositories with at least 250 stars. (It also included gh pages for those repositories.)

GitHub's contribution to the vault consists of 186 reels of film, written on film hardened over 1000 years. Each reel contains 65,000 frames, most of which are QR codes, totaling approximately 21 TB of data. A human-readable index and guide found on each reel explains how to retrieve the contents.

Featured projects in the Arctic Code Vault include:

As to why the date of 02/02/2020 was chosen, there are a couple of possible reasons. For one thing, it's a palindrome, which means you write the same thing forwards or backwards. Furthermore, if you add the numbers (0+2+0+2+2+0+2+0) you will reach 8, which in numerology represents assertion, determination and responsibility. It is also considered lucky in certain cultures.

The team behind the archiving project says: “We plan to evaluate the program and the state of the art of archiving technology every five years. Depending on the results of each evaluation, we may decide to take another snapshot of the public GitHub code and archive it to cold storage.”

You can watch the Arctic Vault video below.

There's also a new video on TikTok showing GitHub's contribution to the vault.