About

Furarchiver is a web service that allows you to download content from Furaffinity by artist. Furarchiver itself does not connect to Furaffinity directly, instead it piggybacks off another service that is difficult to reach and use.

Service structure

For those that prefer dry diagrams over a text description.

Network diagram explaining the infrastructure visually

I only run the furarchiver part of this. Considering that I'm not a god (yet), I cannot fix the other services if they have problems.

Furaffinity

This doesn't requires a lot of explanation. If you're here you know exactly what it is.

The Backend

What is simply named "the backend" on this site is the service that collects files from furaffinity and just dumps them into a folder. There is no way to search for content or download in bulk. It doesn't tries to fix invalid file names either, and sometimes partially cuts them off, which is annoying because this eats up the file name extension and now you have to guess the file type. It's only accessible via Tor hidden service, and it's unknown how exactly it gets content from furaffinity. The service frequently is very slow or drops connections due to the instability of hidden services. Hidden services have multiple nodes between you and the service that are often run by individuals, and if any single of them goes away your connection drops.
It looks like the backend is not actually monitored in any way, and outages spanning multiple weeks have happened multiple times since I've been running this archiver. Those outages are the prime reason for furarchiver to exist.

Tor

Tor (The onion router) is a network of participants that route data for you in a way so no single node knows the start and end of a connection at the same time. A special program is required to access and use this network. Because some nodes are run by individuals or are not always online, your connection can occasionally get dropped. This can make downloading stuff over it annoying if the downloading program is not written in such a way that it can deal with these issues. Additionally, your download speed is limited to the upload speed of the slowest node, and this upload speed is shared across other connections currently being routed over said node.

Furarchiver

Furarchiver (this website) tries to fix the problems with the backend by providing cached copies of downloaded material. It also contains a gallery viewer and allows zip file downloads. Content that has been downloaded over this service will stay available indefinitely, even if the backend or Tor is down. For you this means a more reliable service, and faster downloads.
This service only archives requested material. It doesn't constantly checks for new content on the backend by itself.

Financial support

Furarchiver will always be free of charge, and will never show ads. Storing multiple terabytes of data can get expensive. To support Furarchiver, you can use various crypto currencies.

Version history

This doesn't shows every single update, just the significant ones. You will not see the version increasing for spelling fixes for example.

2.24

This is a general service quality update

2.23

This version contains fixes for a few artists that refused to download

2.22

This release contains a few experimental changes in the hope that the queue is not always full.

2.21

Bugfix

2.20

Database update

2.19

Bugfix

2.18

Bugfix

2.17

Security update

2.16

Small improvements and bugfixes

2.15

Gallery improvements

2.14

Artist scan bugfixes

2.13

Artist scan tweaks

2.12

Cache improvements

2.11

Performance updates

2.10

UI updates and scanning tweaks

2.9

UI and functionality tweaks

2.8

SEO improvements

2.7

Various bugfixes

2.6

Fix downloader incompatibility

2.5

Better error information

2.4

Better downloader implementation

2.3

More downloader fixes

2.2

Fix downloader and directory scan no longer working since latest backend outage

2.1

Add fixes for the artist and file name handler

2.0

Add 3rd party login

1.11

Fix directory scan queue

1.10

More improvements

1.9

This contains various improvements

1.8

This version introduces a new directory scan mechanism that should avoid a proxy response timeout in your browser for big artists. A few UI changes have been made to make Furarchiver easier to use.

1.7

This version mostly contains changes not visible to users.

1.6

Ya'll horny bastards made it necessary that we add a limit to the queue size. This is to ensure that all pending artists complete in a timely manner. Otherwise people keep adding more artists faster than the system can download them, and you end up with a ton of artists that take ages to download instead of a few that are reasonably fast.

1.5

Contact form

1.4

Download fixes

1.3

General performance and reliability improvements. Only a few visible changes.

1.2

Fixed a problem that prevented some files from showing up in the gallery viewer

1.1

First update after the big influx of users and tasks

1.0

First public version of the new system. Compared to the old system this one brings many major improvements. Versioning has been reset to 1.0 because this uses completely different underlying technology and is a full rewrite from scratch.

Contact

You can contact us here