FAQ

OpenArchive is a nonprofit committed to helping people easily preserve and organize their media. We develop intuitive, privacy-first archiving tools and educational resources for secure, long-term preservation. Founded in 2015, OpenArchive fosters a more sustainable media ecosystem and gives users more agency over their media archives.

Save (Secure, Archive, Verify, Encrypt) is a free, open-source mobile application designed to help individuals and communities securely preserve and share mobile media. Built in collaboration with partners like the Guardian Project, Creative Commons, and Tor, Save enables users to send their media safely to the Internet Archive and other online or offline destinations using privacy-enhancing tools such as Tor.

Save offers greater control over how media is stored and accessed over time, supporting secure transit, media authentication, pseudonymity, licensing options, and long-term preservation. It empowers users to decide where and how their media is shared and archived. With Save, you can easily add metadata and Creative Commons licensing to your photos, videos, or audio recordings, then transmit them over encrypted channels to trusted archives. It's available for both iOS and Android devices.

Save is built to safeguard your media and identity in challenging environments—whether you're facing internet instability, device loss, or limited bandwidth. By protecting access to your content and ensuring its longevity, Save helps preserve digital records for future use and sharing.

Save is committed to usability and digital inclusion. Unlike other media-sharing tools, it offers responsive features that streamline secure preservation based on participatory research and co-design with communities we serve. With Save you can:

Authenticate Media: With Save, you ensure your media is always authenticated because you have full control—without interference from intermediaries—from phone to archive. And, when paired with ProofMode (available now for Android, iOS coming soon), you can even add sensor data to corroborate the metadata captured alongside your media.

Secure Transit: Save always uses TLS (Transport Layer Security) to ensure in-transit security and encryption. When you enable Tor for mobile (either via Orbot: Tor for Android or Onion Browser for iOS), you add an additional layer of protection to ensure no one intercepts your media as it travels from your phone to the Internet Archive or your server of choice.

Long-Term Preservation: When you use Save to archive your mobile media in a trusted archive (such as the Internet Archive or OwnCloud), you ensure unobstructed access for generations to come. This is in stark contrast to popular social media platforms like X, Facebook, or Instagram, which aren’t committed to long-term media preservation.

Licensing: With Save you can communicate your intentions for future use by easily generating a Creative Commons license in-app allowing others to reuse or modify your work.

Stay Organized: Save's easy-to-use design allows teams and individuals to seamlessly streamline media from many phones into organized folders specific to each contributor.

Add Metadata: Save lets you add metadata like location, people, and notes to your archived media.

Flag Significant Content: You can flag certain media as “significant” to alert reviewers that this folder contains sensitive/violent media or just use it as a “favorites” folder.

Import Media: Save allows you to import and share media from other apps on your phone, including audio, notes, and PDF files.

Improve Redundancy: With Save you can further protect your media by creating and storing multiple copies on different secure servers. Whether hosting locally or remotely, your data can be encrypted on the backend and only accessible by who you want.

View Progress: When storing media via Save, you can view how much content has been uploaded.

Prioritize Uploads: prioritize particular media to upload first over others (e.g., order the smallest files first and largest files last).

We designed Save in collaboration with individuals and organizations around the world, including:

Community groups documenting events, stories, or local history;

Academic institutions collecting and preserving media from fieldwork or research projects;

Libraries, archives, and cultural organizations building digital collections for long-term access;

Independent creators, documentarians, and media makers organizing their own mobile media archives; and

Anyone interested in securely storing, sharing, and managing personal or community media collections.

Save helps address common challenges in digital media preservation, including:

Loss of data: Whether due to hardware failure, accidental deletion, environmental damage (like floods or mold), or other disruptions, important media can easily be lost. Save helps protect against these risks by enabling users to create multiple backups and distribute them across geographically diverse servers.

Single point of failure: Storing data in only one location increases the risk of permanent loss. Save allows you to connect and send media to multiple storage destinations, ensuring that if one location becomes inaccessible, your content remains available elsewhere.

Data integrity and secure transmission: To help preserve the authenticity and privacy of your media, Save employs strong encryption protocols like TLS (Transport Layer Security) and uses the Tor network via Orbot (for Android; iOS support coming soon). These features help ensure secure, private transfers and reduce the risk of interception or tampering.

Verifiability and authenticity: Trust in digital content often relies on the ability to confirm that media has not been altered. Save uses SHA-256 hashing to create unique digital fingerprints for files and incorporates ProofMode (for Android, with iOS support coming soon) to support robust media verification and provenance tracking.

Although Save offers a suite of many unique features, it’s no silver bullet. When using the app, please be aware of the following limitations:

Save does not provide storage or server space: You will need to set up your own WebDav-compatible server (such as Nextcloud, etc.), or use the Internet Archive (free) or DropBox to create and store your collections.

Save does not provide on-device encryption: Save does not store your media; it only stores thumbnails from your camera roll, which are not currently encrypted in the app. Once organized into projects and uploaded to the server, all media is sent over an encrypted connection. We recommend that you also encrypt your server for enhanced security.

Save does not delete original copies of media from your camera roll: Once media is sent to a server, you can then delete the thumbnails from the Save app if you choose. The original content will remain in your camera roll (unless you remove it).

Save does not have an in-app killswitch: Uninstalling Save will remove all local copies of media/metadata stored in the app and all local configurations and settings, including account information.

No, OpenArchive collaborates with the Internet Archive, but is an independent project.

The Internet Archive is a nonprofit digital library offering free universal access to books, movies, and music, as well as almost a trillion archived web pages.

OpenArchive is a project dedicated to the ethical collection and long-term preservation of mobile media. Save (secure, archive, verify, encrypt) is the mobile application we’ve created to do this. Save enables people to send media to multiple storage backends, including the Internet Archive, Nextcloud instances, and other decentralized backends of their choice. This option also enables people to create public or private media collections that they fully control.

Although social media platforms are an easy place to house photos and videos, these platforms lack critical security safeguards and are subject to state censorship and content takedowns from the companies themselves. Use Save to avoid these pitfalls:

Social media often exposes at-risk sources: Although major social media platforms can amplify content by exposing it to a large audience, these platforms can also expose sources to unwanted identification. Individuals shown or otherwise implicated in videos, photos, or audio clips may be targeted both online and offline.

Social media can make it difficult to authenticate or verify media: Social media sites often strip metadata (info about where and how media was captured) from uploaded content. While this feature enhances privacy, the practice also makes media authentication and verification more difficult.

Media gets lost on social media platforms: Within a sea of content, it is difficult to contextualize or organize media for easy access in the future.

Social Media is not committed to long-term preservation: Companies moderate content, take down media, and go out of business.

Our work is critical and ongoing. If you would like to help fund our efforts, you can now make a tax-deductible donation thanks to our fiscal sponsor, Media Alliance.

There are other ways you can help too. Please contact us if you're interested in volunteering or providing in-kind expertise to advance human rights through secure digital media preservation. We’d love to hear from you!