In this case the less we know, the longer it will last. Notice how this site ignores robots.txt and copyright claims by litigious companies that would like to see their past erased.

The data saved on your NAS will outlast this site regardless of who owns/funds it.

Their explanation for ignoring robots makes sense - they say they ignore it because their crawler only runs when a human enters a URL and archives it, they also link to Google as this is what they do.

How do you figure?

What do you mean? There’s a line of companies waiting to sue anyone involved with that site. That’s been the case for many years.

A site devoted to duplicating content from elsewhere online, and with a significant use-case of defeating paywalls, would be a very likely candidate for lawsuits.

Concealing ownership would tend to help avoid this / minimise consequences.

That might still be a brittle defence.

yeah funding is a grey area...

fwiw the website is only accessible by VPN in a lot of countries, which is say a lot for me..and i don't think they've taken down any content, although i cant say for sure.

So ... what is known about the operator(s) / funding?

Likely Slavic⸺

• WHOIS points to a "Denis Petrov" in Prague

• Share menu has buttons for Reddit, VKontakte, Twitter, Pinboard, and Livejournal. Eyebrow raising. VK is Russian, and so is LJ nowadays. Pinboard (notable as successor of del.icio.us) is American, coincidentally founded by a Polish immigrant.

• With a sizable dose of confirmation bias, the mistakes in the English of the site and blog do feel appropriately Slavic

It's stated to be privately funded with costs around US$4000/month, began accepting donations in 2016 (https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Archive.today#Vital_S...)

Thanks. That's largely the sense I've had.

Motivation / utility is a question that's occurred to me more than once.