Earlier this month, streaming audio platform SoundCloud announced that it would cut 40 percent of its staff and close its San Francisco and London offices, as part of an effort to stay independent and ensure long-term success. A few days later though, co-founder and CEO Alex Ljung admitted that these measures would only save the firm enough money to survive until the fourth quarter of this year.
Fearing for the future of the site, one Reddit user who goes by the name of “makemakemake”, claimed on Reddit’s “DataHoarder” thread that he has downloaded all 900TB of SoundCloud’s public archive. He provided a 100GB log file to prove his accomplishment.
The Redditor used Google"s cloud computing services and downloaded the files over a connection of 80Gb/s during the course of one weekend. Makemakemake does not plan to make the archive available to others, because as he claimed “it"d be quicker to download everything from [SoundCloud] yourself. Only have 10G to where the data is now.”
The Reddit user is not the only one trying to archive SoundCloud, as according to The Verge, Archive Team has announced it will also make a backup of the company’s vast database of music. Archive Team, founded by Jason Scott in 2009, is a group dedicated to the preservation of content housed by at-risk services.
Archive Team says it will not make a complete backup, focusing mostly on older files, as they are the least likely to exist anywhere else. According to the project, “a full grab would be too big and would raise concerns of mass copyright infringement.”
Source: Business Insider