Internet Archive Downloader

Downloads collections from the Internet Archive. Requires an active Internet Archive account.

Installation

pip install internetarchive
ia configure

Fully automated downloading with restarts on failures

The easiest way to download a crawl from Internet Archive is running ia-download.sh:

bash ia-download.sh <CRAWL> <DOWNLOAD_DIR> <LOG_DIR> <NTHREADS> <CREDENTIALS_FILE>

downloads the given CRAWL to DOWNLOAD_DIR/CRAWL in NTHREADS parallel threads, making as many attempts as required to download all files successfully. Logs are written to LOG_DIR/CRAWL. User credentials are taken from CREDENTIALS_FILE.

E.g.:

bash ia-download.sh survey_00003 ../../../two/warc/ia/ ../../../two/warc/log/ia/ 1000 ./ia-env/ia-oe\@ifi.uio.no.ini

Downloading step-by-step

For more control over the downloading process, e.g. when the previous method does not work, run the following steps manually: get the list of items for the given crawl (ia search), then get file URLs and download files for those items (ia-download.py). Check stderr, if downloading some of the files failed re-run ia-download.py.

ia search -i collection:wide00016 > wide00016.txt

./ia-download.py -j 64 < ./wide00016.txt | tee ia-download.log

Options:

> ./ia-download.py --help
usage: ia-download.py [-h] [--jobs JOBS] [--dest DEST] [--shuffle] [--filter FILTER] [identifiers ...]

positional arguments:
  identifiers           IA identifiers to download warcs from. If none specified read from stdin

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --jobs JOBS, -j JOBS  parallel downloads
  --dest DEST, -d DEST  destination directory
  --shuffle             download items in random order
  --filter FILTER       filename filter

Acknowledgements

This project has received funding from the 🇪🇺 European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101070350 and from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee [grant number 100525A46].