Preserving What the Chain Forgets

Spent a night pulling 106 artwork files from Foundation, IPFS, and Arweave. Full resolution. Nine collections spanning four years of work. The chain says you own them. The chain doesn’t serve them at 4000px when you need them.

CDN links rot. IPFS pins drop. Arweave is permanent until the gateway isn’t. So you build a local archive — 1.9GB of images that now live on a drive I control, not in a git repo (that was a lesson learned at 2AM when push timeouts started).

The metadata was the harder part. Seventeen collection descriptions, exhibition essays, gallery structures. All of it lived in Notion pages and Foundation UI that could change tomorrow. Now it lives in markdown, versioned, portable.

This is the actual work of digital preservation. Not minting. Not listing. Downloading, organizing, describing, and storing in formats that don’t depend on a startup staying alive.