The Internet Archive is intended for use by researchers, historians and scholars. Currently, access to the archive requires basic unix programming skills. Internet Archive technical support is very limited. If you do not have reasonably advanced programming skills, the best way to access the archived data is via the Wayback Machine. We are building tools for higher-level access.

There are two types of accounts available to access the archived data. These are both available free of charge.

An account on research.archive.org allows access to 8 hosts, roughly 4 terabytes. This is generally the first account a new user will be afforded. The hosts are NFS mounted onto research.archive.org and may be accessed through /net. See the example code page for assistance on data mining with a research account.

An account on homeserver.archive.org allows access to all of the hosts in the archive. If you would like to upgrade your account from research to homeserver, we would ask that you join us for one of our Friday lunch meetings and offer a brief presentation of your progress.

Please visit the project proposal page to acquire one of these accounts.