Occasionally we hear from someone who wants to download every file we've got.
That's fine! Feel free. However:
Please respect our terms of use. The files archived here have been contributed by many hands over a period of decades. Some of them have open-source or Creative Common licenses. Others do not; they rely on common understanding of the IF Archive, which is that this is a place to share the heritage of our community. If you see no formal license on a work, assume it is meant for "personal use only".
Please do not thrash the server. If you want to download a zillion files, throttle your download speed or allow a moment of rest time between files.
In early 2024 we experimented with the idea of making the entire Archive downloadable in a single massive tar file. It wound up being about 30 gigabytes. Sadly, the AWS bandwidth cost of this did not justify the added value.
Instead, we now support rsync to fetch Archive files. The rsync protocol allows you to maintain a synchronized copy of the entire Archive. After the initial download, it will only fetch files that have changed.
We offer four rsync sources:
rsync://rsync.ifarchive.org/if-archiversync://rsync.ifarchive.org/indexesrsync://rsync.ifarchive.org/metadatarsync://rsync.ifarchive.org/misc(Sizes are as of early 2024. They all grow from year to year.)
Since web use is our primary customer (and rsync is not protected by a CDN), the rsync service has a modest bandwidth limit. Fetching the entire Archive (the first time!) will take roughly 45 minutes.