Fire damages Internet archive building

The non-profit organisation behind the Internet Archive has made a plea for donations following a fire at its building in San Francisco, BBC News reported.

The group runs the popular Wayback Machine, an archive of 364 billion web pages, designed to show people what sites looked like in years gone by.

No data was lost, a spokesman said, but the damage was estimated at $600,000 (£373,000).

He said: "It is in difficult times like these that we turn to our community."

On the group's blog, founder Brewster Kahle wrote: "This episode has reminded us that digitising and making copies are good strategies for both access and preservation.

"We have copies of the data in the Internet Archive in multiple locations, so even if our main building had been involved in the fire we still would not have lost the amazing content we have all worked so hard to collect."

However, the fire did cause the loss of some materials that were being prepared for digitisation - the full extent of which is still being assessed.