FOUNDATION NEWS

Introducing Guardian Nodes

A single archive, however well run, is still a single point of failure. The next piece of FKPF’s long-term thinking is Guardian Nodes — independent servers, run by people and institutions who care about this, that each hold a copy of what FKPF preserves.

A Guardian Node isn’t just a backup drive. Its purpose is to actively participate in preservation: holding archives of source code, releases, documentation and licenses, checking that its own copies are still intact, and being one more place the same knowledge survives if anywhere else fails.

We expect Guardian Nodes to eventually be run by individuals, universities, libraries, museums, companies, and non-profits — anyone willing to dedicate reliable, long-running infrastructure to the same goal. There is no requirement to run specific hardware; a small home server is as welcome in principle as a rack in a university data center.

To be clear about where this stands today: the Guardian Node program is still being designed, and applications are not open yet. We would rather finish the design properly — verification, replication, how nodes report their status back to the network — than rush a network we can’t yet stand behind. We’ll announce here when that changes.