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