About

Furarchiver is a web service that allows you to download content from Furaffinity by artist, including content that is no longer available on the site because the artist deleted it, or because the entire account was wiped. 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 made in visio over a text description.

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. I do not know who runs the service or how you would be able to contact them if the service is down. 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 (5 or more) 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.

In case you're familiar with the old downloader, this here is its replacement. The old downloader had various issues such as not continuing the caching process when you close the browser window. It would also bog down the backend when multiple people were using it at the same time to cache new content.
The client side zip generator was taking load off the server, but large galleries could cause memory overflows in the browser on devices with little free memory. The service has grown over time to the point where it's no longer viable to edit, and a complete rewrite was in order.

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. As an alternative you can use patreon, which gives you additional features.

• Bitcoin: 1AWDGLcdn89WqB5NoGfPczBNFieFYzwqVF
• Dogecoin: DUSHPUMM3gr8t6QEYBnZdV4BtqykG7AZCw
• Dashcoin: XjmsUARouxyk8APWZ14MAbY1mvxtjZBTqR
• Ethereum: 0x90f3039a8491cc018787618b4a1f4534f8b857f0
• Monero: 87VxmUwJ4732isC2fd21SBYFojUdGZj8ZFFyFkvTsnSGYyztCyqGXty22adi9tdfJkBc24ubRX6x5QHqcjrcXYmzFFMwASr

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.

2.15

Gallery improvements

• Adds paging to the gallery to no longer load all images at once, which becomes problematic with big artists

2.14

Artist scan bugfixes

• It was not possible to search for existing artists if the IP is restricted by a new artist scan
• Scan restriction lowered to 30 minutes

2.13

Artist scan tweaks

• This update limits users to scan for at most one artist per hour
• A specific artist cannot be scanned more than once every 14 days

2.12

Cache improvements

• This update improves handling of cached content

2.11

Performance updates

• Galleries should now load faster and not gobble up all your bandwidth
• Resolved a problem that caused an error if the artist list was not yet available directly after a restart

2.10

UI updates and scanning tweaks

• The artist count in the footer should be more accurate.
• You cannot rescan an artist as often to give less popular artists a better chance

2.9

UI and functionality tweaks

• The footer now shows the number of artists too. It also shows the limits now
• The directory scan queue should no longer overflow when a scan gets stuck

2.8

SEO improvements

• The site was improved to make it work better with search engines. There should be no visual change for visitors.

2.7

Various bugfixes

• This should fix a few things behind the scenes that have accumulated over time but were not worthy of their own release.

2.6

Fix downloader incompatibility

• This should fix the "Invalid chunked encoding line: ###" type of error

2.5

Better error information

• The red error box that appears on some pages has had its error message improved.

2.4

Better downloader implementation

• This should fix the "Unimplemented transfer type" problems.

2.3

More downloader fixes

• The previous fix from 2.2 did not work for long. This should be a more permanent solution.

2.2

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

• Directory scan and file downloader should be working again now

2.1

Add fixes for the artist and file name handler

• Permit download of artists with some special characters in their name
• Permit file names consisting of an outdated name format
• Directory scan for some artists can now show progress

2.0

Add 3rd party login

• This version adds Patreon support.

1.11

Fix directory scan queue

• Resolved an issue where the directory scan would occasionally show that an artist was not in the queue at all after sucessfully scanning for it.

1.10

More improvements

• The artist scan page occasionally failed to load which should now be fixed
• Monitored artists should no longer be prematurely be marked as complete

1.9

This contains various improvements

• File creation date is now retained when creating a zip file
• You can now have files grouped by type in the archive
• The FA "Image Not Found" file is no longer downloaded for new artists.

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.

• Long directory scans no longer cause a server error response
• Fix "Open Gallery" button in message boxes occasionally not working
• The green/red backend status boxes now update periodically
• The artist overview now has a link to open the original FA profile
• The artist search page has a new feature where you can fix some wrong FA user names
• Future version updates will show a popup

1.7

This version mostly contains changes not visible to users.

• The artist search now makes suggestions again
• Artists that still have files in the download queue cannot be scanned for new content anymore
• Added hotlink protection that can be turned on if people start hotlinking too many images

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.

• Queue size now has a limit for pending artist count and pending file count

1.5

Contact form

• This version introduces a contact form to reach us easier

1.4

Download fixes

• This fixes the broken zip download

1.3

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

• Fixed possible memory leak
• Task list is now occasionally saved
• Watch list will only fully expand when hovering over it
• Completed artists no longer show a dialog on their own if notification permission was not granted

1.2

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

• Fixed file name encoding

1.1

First update after the big influx of users and tasks

• Downloads are now evenly distributed across artists. This stops the archival process of small artists from getting punished by big artists
• Status API was optimized to not bog down the server too much if the task list is large
• Restarting the service adds all directory scans from the last 24h to the task list again
• Ability for the application to be locked, or global messages to be displayed

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.

• Introduced a database to hopefully speed up file scans
• Downloads from the backend no longer require the user to be present and happen fully on the server
• Limited number of download threads should remove some pressure from the backend
• Regular backend health check that halts all downloads if the backend is down
• Notification system to alert visitor when his artist completes all downloads
• Validation of downloaded images to reject most corrupt image files
• Optimized zip archive mechanism for faster downloads
• Zip file can be downloaded with and without descriptions
• Visitor can monitor multiple artists at once now without opening multiple tabs
• Directory scan cache to take futher pressure off from the backend
• Gallery viewer

Contact

You can contact us here

Deleting content

We will not delete content from the cache or block certain artists from being downloaded ever, even if you're the owner and you request it. This would be completely meaningless because we physically can't remove the files from the backend because it's not our service. Furarchiver is merely a proxy service. It neither generates nor consumes content. Removing it from this cache would not make it unavailable to people at all. Trying to censor can have unintended consequences and tends to backfire.
Users would notice fairly quickly that an artist that exists in the backend suddenly becomes unavailable here, which will draw additional attention to the content you want to remove.
The most elegant way out of this is to just forget about it and let it silently collect dust in your past. We completely understand that this will not feel very satisfactory.