About Digital Art Rescue Lab

Preservation, pinning and redundancy

For IPFS-hosted artwork to remain reliably retrievable, at least one node or service must continue retaining and supplying its data. If the last available copy disappears, the CID may survive while the artwork file does not.

Platforms historically paid pinning services on behalf of artists and collectors. Many users therefore believed that minting on IPFS meant their artwork had been permanently stored. In reality, continued availability depended upon somebody maintaining the pinning arrangement.

When a platform closes, it may continue paying for pinning for a limited period, as Async and KnownOrigin appear to have done. When that arrangement ends, artwork may go dark unless another party has retrieved and pinned the underlying data.

MakersPlace has announced a different arrangement: it says Pinata has agreed to keep all MakersPlace NFT data pinned perpetually. It also moved high-resolution files from older contracts onto IPFS and worked with marketplaces to map affected tokens to those files. This makes MakersPlace less urgent as a rescue target.

Pinata is currently the most familiar pinning service within this community. It offers a relatively accessible way for individuals to create additional pins, but it remains a subscription-based commercial provider.

Multiple Pinata users pinning the same CID protects against the lapse of one individual subscription. It does not provide full provider-level redundancy. If all known copies depend upon the same company or infrastructure, the failure of that provider affects all of them.

Individuals can run IPFS nodes using equipment such as Raspberry Pis with attached storage and an always-on internet connection. AfroViking's device and Lou's prototype combine local IPFS storage with an artwork display. For preservation purposes, however, the display is optional and accounts for part of the cost. A simpler storage-and-serving node could be cheaper and accommodate larger drives.

The total storage requirement remains unknown and must be established before hardware or hosting can be costed reliably.

Proposed distributed-node solution

To create true redundancy, DRL could establish a small network of independently controlled IPFS nodes operated by trusted stewards in different locations. (Currently code-named the Steward Swarm.)

A first-stage network might include five to seven nodes, although not every node would necessarily need to hold every corpus. The preservation plan could define which collections each node holds and ensure that every priority corpus exists in several independent places.

Networking the devices would allow them to coordinate what should be pinned and replace lost replicas more automatically. However, initial redundancy could also be established manually by supplying each steward with a verified list of required CIDs and checking that the files are retrievable from each node.

Each node would require suitable hardware and storage, reliable internet access, monitoring and maintenance support, contingency funding, and a named steward with a succession or return agreement.

If a steward can no longer maintain a node, responsibility and data should pass to another approved steward or return to DRL. Institutional partners such as libraries, museums, universities or digital archives could eventually provide an additional continuity layer, but no organisation should be named as a prospective custodian until it has agreed.

Remote servers, such as independently administered IPFS nodes hosted through Hetzner or another provider, could complement physical community nodes. They remain dependent on commercial data centres and should therefore form one part of a mixed system, not the entire solution.