I’d love to know if anyone’s aware of a bulk metadata export feature or repository. I would like to have a copy of the metadata and .torrent files of all items.

I guess one way is to use the CLI but this relies on knowing which item you want and I don’t know if there’s a way to get a list of all items.

I believe downloading via BitTorrent and seeding back is a win-win: it bolsters the Archive’s resilience while easing server strain. I’ll be seeding the items I download.

Edit: If you want to enumerate all item names in the entire archive.org repository, take a look at https://archive.org/developers/changes.html. This will do that for you!

  • I use the CLI tool, even right now waiting to finish some downloads. The CLI tool can actually give you a list of all items with ia list {ID} (replace {ID} with the actual id of the stuff you want to download). But you don’t even need to list the items, because you can download with a glob (in example *.torrent like your shell has. Or if you have the ID anyway, you can specify the filenames too with {ID}_archive.torrent

    Here is an example how to do this with my own upload https://archive.org/details/gamefaqs_txt where the id becomes gamefaqs_txt

    ia download gamefaqs_txt --glob *.torrent
    

    or use a variable to set id and download all files that start with the id, which should be all the meta data

    id=gamefaqs_txt ; ia download "${id}" --glob "${id}_*"