>>12
Hi I read your post.
Four years later, we have multiple archives offering full size images. As of today, http://ar.vyrd.net/ has a list of these archives. According to that site, the only "boards without comprehensive public archives" are /b/, /gif/. There was a /b/ archive briefly but as you could expect, it was shut down due to CP. (It was hosted at fuuka.worldathleticproject.org by a guy named nemdiggers, if i remember correctly)
There are also a few other personal archives that I've seen people mention or link to on /g/.
Some of these archives even have communities themselves thanks to "ghost posting," the ability to make internal posts in archived threads.
>On top of that, in the years since it started an archive would have likely grown into the terabyte range.
According to http://ns1758.ca/winch/winchest.html, the world's first TB hard drive was released on 2007 March 19 (almost a year after >>5 ), and cost $370.
Today, hard drives with triple the size are available at less than a third of that, and 1TB HDD's are about $60.