Beyond backup: Independent mirror boosts software resilience
In the blink of cursor, lines of code meticulously crafted over hours, days, or even weeks can disappear, falling victim to a simple slip of the finger, a wayward keystroke, or a rogue software bug.
In a significant step towards safeguarding the world’s software heritage, the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA) has launched a mirror of the Software Heritage archive. This marks the first node in the organization’s global network of distributed repositories, aimed at ensuring long-term access to the source code of publicly available software.
Software Heritage, often likened to a modern Library of Alexandria for software, collects and preserves the source code of software programs, building a vast digital repository spanning languages, platforms and eras. By creating a network of independent mirrors, the organization seeks to mitigate the risk of data loss from accidental or malicious events.
OSNet talked to Stefano Zacchiroli, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Software Heritage to learn more.
Tell us more about why this matters.
At Software Heritage, we preserve software source code for future generations. The most effective approach to avoid losses for centuries to come is, of course, having as many data copies as possible.
Copies at our scale are not cheap—almost 20 billion files for 1 PiB of data, growing daily—but we were already operating three of them since the early days of the archive.
However, copies alone are insufficient, as they are all under our control: a software bug or worse can destroy data from all copies. Mirrors decrease this risk: they are independent archive copies, that even we at Software Heritage could not destroy or tamper with if we wanted to. The opening of the first archive mirror at ENEA in Italy marks an important milestone for the project and sets the stage for future mirror openings.
Zacchiroli and co-founder Roberto Di Cosmo at the mirror launch in Bologna, Italy.
How can people get involved?
Institutions can help in many ways, from becoming a sponsor to hosting a mirror themselves. Individuals can contribute like they do to any Open Source project, by looking at our code and contributing fixes and improvements.
