Its not like they actually were able to delete anything though. Even if they did, anyone with decent IT knowledge knows that all deltas are backed up daily to offline backups and mirrors all using COW filesystems (zero actual deletion possible). In the grand scheme of things the internet archive doesn't even have that much data (most likely under an exabyte all on high capacity HDDs) Which is pretty small and cheap with the kind of funding they have and today's tech standards. YouTube for insistence, stores probably 20-50 exabytes all on SSDs (growing immensely by the minute). YouTube also has a bandwidth capacity light years beyond any other platform which is the most costly part of their operation.