About us
A library project that outgrew the library
Chronofold began in 2011 as a regional library's attempt to keep local news online after three papers closed in one year.
Origin
The local record disappeared first
Three regional newspapers shut down within a year and took two decades of reporting with them. The library that noticed had no budget and a lot of determination. Fifteen years later the same principles apply: state your scope, keep what you promise to keep, and make the record verifiable rather than merely available.
- A foundation, funded by libraries and public grants
- Removals are documented and counted publicly
- Every capture is verifiable against a signed monthly digest
One regional collection
Three closed newspapers, 40 TB.
National government crawl
Weekly, four countries.
Full-text search
Across the whole archive, not just titles.
Browser-based capture
JavaScript-heavy pages archive properly.
Signed integrity digests
Verification without trusting us.
41.2 billion captures
34 PB, 1.9 TB crawled every day.
How we work
Boring on purpose
We would rather run software that is three years old and understood than something new that pages us at 04:00.
Own the path
We buy transit from multiple carriers and peer directly wherever it is possible, so a single bad hop is never a single point of failure.
Write it down
Every incident gets a public write-up. Every design decision gets an RFC. Institutional memory beats heroics.
Some of the people behind it
A quarter of the company has been here since the first rack.