Help us keep our data afloat
During the first few months of our project we have enormously benefited from the technical and financial support of SUCHO, a data rescue initiative for Ukrainian digital cultural heritage, and EleutherAI, a non-profit, open-source research lab. Their generous assistance has included setting up the servers which host our website, our chat platform, and the Data Rescue Tracker. EleutherAI has also been paying for the cloud storage we have used to back up over 100TB of public at-risk datasets. In order to work towards sustainability, and to distribute the financial burden more evenly, we are now starting to accept financial donations through the platform Open Collective.
Join our crew
We have created three simple ways for you to join our data preservation fleet:
🛟 Data Life Preserver — €5/month
Become a Data Life Preserver and help keep our data rescue efforts afloat with a recurring monthly donation of just €5. Your consistent support helps us plan for the future and maintain ongoing rescue operations.
⚓ Anchor Sponsor — €20/month
Serve as an anchor for our efforts with a monthly commitment of €20. As an Anchor Sponsor, you provide the steadfast backing that allows us to take on more ambitious preservation projects and extend our reach.
🌊 Shore Support — Starting at €1
Pay what you can as a member of our Shore Support — any amount makes a splash in preserving essential information. One-time donations start at just €1, and every contribution counts.
Why we need support: Data storage is expensive
Our largest expense in the coming months will be cloud storage. We have already backed up over 100TB of bulk datasets, and we want to make this data available to the public again as soon as possible. Our goal is to catalog, merge, and package the data, so that anyone can download it. In the long-term we aim to hand over the cleaned data to institutional partners and digital preservation professionals, but in order to give those institutions access to these data, we need cloud storage in the short-term.
Public cloud storage is very expensive. The Big Three cloud providers charge extremely high prices: around €25/TB/month for storage and around €100 for 1TB of download traffic. That means that each time someone downloads one terabyte of these rescued datasets we would be charged €100. Fortunately, we have found a reasonable alternative cloud storage provider that charges around €20/TB/month for storage and not one cent for downloads! That means that by donating just €20 you can keep one TB of public data afloat for one month.
Our fiscal home: Open Collective Europe
The new partnership with the Open Collective Europe Foundation provides us with a fiscal home. Importantly to us, using the Open Collective platform means that we will have a completely transparent budget. You will be able to see exactly how your contributions support our work – from server and storage costs, to daily operations, even advocacy! – will all be drawn from this central pool of funds. This opens up more possibilities for future work and innovations, and we’re excited about the potential!
If you know an organisation that might be interested in supporting us with a larger grant, feel free to contact us directly at datarescueproject@protonmail.com. Through Open Collective Europe we have 501(c)(3)-equivalent status and can accept grants from nonprofits as well as public funding bodies from the US, EU, and other countries.
While financial support is crucial, we still need your expertise, your connections, and your passion.
Thank you for being part of this important work!
