migration the way out

arweave's permanence rests on an economy, and no economy is eternal. this site is not eternal either. we are writing down now what a collector would lose when that day comes.

three things that do not vanish

the work itself. in the buyer's hands, inside the archive kit, byte-for-byte.

its identity. sha-256 belongs to no system. arweave, ipfs, an external drive — wherever the file goes it yields the same digest. identity does not depend on hosting.

the date proof — not yet. no merkle root has been written to ethereum so far, so there is currently no date claim to lose. when one is published it lives on ethereum rather than on arweave, and arweave ending would not touch it. the verification page always shows the true state.

so the only thing that can be lost is hosting. and hosting can be rebuilt.

publishing your own copy

put it on ipfs. add the master file from your kit:

a cid is derived from content, so the same bytes give the same address: your copy and anyone else's resolve identically, and a pin that lapsed anywhere comes back at the address it always had. nobody depends on anybody. the kit's sha-256 remains the identity of record — it belongs to no system at all and cannot be changed by a different tool version.

upload to your own arweave wallet. push the folder from your own wallet using ardrive or turbo. you pay, you own the record, you ask no one.

or simply keep it. honestly the most durable option: copy it to two separate drives, one in another building.

checking a copy you hold

the shop page has a checker that runs in your own browser: drop in a file and it computes its sha-256 and compares it against the digests published here. nothing is uploaded — the file never leaves your machine — and the answer does not depend on this site being honest, because sha256sum anywhere gives the same line. it also names which work the file is, which matters when a folder has been carried between drives for years and the filename no longer says anything.

after moving

wherever you move it, run this against the new copy:

all lines reading ok means the move succeeded. this check is independent of whether the place you moved to is trustworthy — it catches corruption either way.

check a file, here

drop in a file you already hold. it is read in this browser, hashed here, and compared against the digests this archive published. nothing is uploaded. if it matches, the page tells you which work it is — which matters when a folder has moved between drives for years and the filename no longer says anything.

health asked now, not at build time

the old health page was a snapshot taken when this site was generated: it could say "stored permanently" about bytes that had since become unreachable, and nobody would find out. press the button and the browser fetches each work from a public arweave gateway, hashes what comes back, and compares it with the hash published on the work's own page.

it is slow — it downloads every master — and it is one request per work to a gateway, exactly the request any visitor could make. nothing is sent anywhere.

check every work now

what we do not promise

we do not say "forever". we say instead: the work is in your hands, its identity is in mathematics, its date is on a chain. none of the three require us to still exist. that is the whole preservation claim — nothing more.