With the assistance of its members and friends (especially AFNIC, RIPE, Paul Vixie, Duane Wessels, Peter Koch and Paul Hoffman) DNS-OARC has assembled a historical archive of the DNS root zone dating back to June 1999. This Root Zone Archive is a part of our larger project, the Zone File Repository.

Root Zone Trends

The following graph shows trends in the contents of the root zone:

(click for full size)

 

 

Plus an idea of how many TLDs have DS records:

(click for full size)

 

 

Coverage

We are now archiving the root zone daily. As of August 19, 2018 we have the following number of days for these years:

Year Count
1993 1
1994 1
1999 84
2000 319
2001 311
2002 226
2003 344
2004 357
2005 362
2006 364
2007 364
2008 366
2009 365
2010 365
2011 364
2012 366
2013 365
2014 365
2015 365
2016 366
2017 366
2018 192...and counting.

If you have even older data that you can share, or can help fill in some of the gaps, please contact us.

Subversion Access

The Root Zone Archive data is available only to DNS-OARC members, either as raw zone files or as a Subversion repository. Members may access the repository using the OARC credentials at the following Subversion URL:

https://zfr.dns-oarc.net/root-zone

If you wanted to see what the root zone looked like on February 5th 2009, you would execute:

$ svn checkout \
  --username=oarcuser \
  '-r{2009-02-05}' \
  https://zfr.dns-oarc.net/root-zone
$ less root-zone/root.zone