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GitHub has announced a new addition to its Archive Program. The organization will save thousands of repositories from its platform on piqlFilm and store them in a permanently frozen mine shaft in Svalbard.

The Greatest Hits collection consists of a collection of the 12,000 most popular repositories on GitHub printed on piqlFilm and stored in a 3D printed box. PiqlFilm is a type of film designed to be durable enough to be preserved for 750 years or possibly even 2000 years under the right conditions.

In addition to the most popular repositories, there will also be a collection of 5,000 randomly selected repositories, so future historians can use those to paint an overall picture of the software on the platform. GitHub makes four of the boxes. Three of them will be placed inside the repository and the fourth stays in GitHub’s office.

Arctic Code Vault

The Arctic Code Vault is an archive in the Norwegian archipelago Svalbard. It is made of permanently frozen abandoned mine shaft hundreds of meters below ground. The intention of the archive is to preserve digital media for at least 500 years, even if for whatever reason all electronics in the world are disabled.

The archive is located near the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. This is an archive of all kinds of plant seeds, archived for the case some plant species is lost elsewhere in the world.

GitHub has been actively contributing to the Arctic Code Vault since 2019. The company then announced that it would regularly add snapshots to the archive as of February 2, 2020.

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