A RAID for Web Content: Dries Buytaert on Digital Preservation and Link Rot

In his blog post A RAID for Web Content, Dries Buytaert reflects on the fragility of digital knowledge and the growing problem of link rot. Inspired by RAID storage systems, he argues that instead of trying to make individual platforms permanent, we should accept failure as inevitable and design around it. Every piece of online content depends on a fragile stack, from file formats and storage media to organisations and economic models, and when any layer fails, the content can vanish entirely.

To address this, Dries outlines an approach he calls a “digital preservation RAID,” distributing content across multiple platforms such as GitHub, the Internet Archive, IPFS, and blockchain-based storage like Filecoin or Arweave. Each option has strengths and risks, but the goal isn’t to find a single perfect solution. Instead, it’s about redundancy, adaptability, and long-term thinking. The real cost of content loss, he notes, isn’t just missing data, it’s losing the ability to learn from the past, a responsibility the web’s first digital generation must take seriously.