The Internet Archive, known for its "Wayback Machine" which keeps websites even after they are shut down, is asking for donations after a fire damaged its scanning centre.
The nonprofit archive was founded in 1996 and helps researchers, historians, scholars and others find historical collections that exist in digital format.
It says damage to equipment from Tuesday's fire is estimated at $US600,000 ($A631,346), not including building repairs.
"This episode has reminded us that digitizing and making copies are good strategies for both access and preservation," the San Francisco-based archive said in a statement.
"We have copies of the data in the Internet Archive in multiple locations, so even if our main building had been involved in the fire we still would not have lost the amazing content we have all worked so hard to collect."
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The archive has about 364 billion archived web pages along with texts, audio, moving images and software.
"Some physical materials were in the scanning centre because they were being digitised, but most were in a separate locked room or in our physical archive and were not lost," the statement said.
"Of those materials we did unfortunately lose, about half had already been digitized. We are working with our library partners now to assess."
