Alternatives to the Wayback Machine

[ysabetwordsmith]

onlyknownothing has pointed out that the Wayback Machine is down. Read more about the problem here. While this is among the most popular archives, it is not the only one. When it comes to data backups, more is better. Explore different archive sites, because they do things differently -- what won't save on one usually will save on another. When one is down, others are probably still up. Here are some options...


Paywall Reader
This site offers multiple ways to search for a legible version of a website. Some of those, like the Wayback Machine and Archive.Today, will give you the option to save a page if they don't already have a copy of it.

Ghost Archive is clunky and unreliable but better than nothing.

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Wikipedia:List of web archives on Wikipedia
This is a global list and may be the most useful if you are outside the United States of America.

Comments

[matsushima]

Am I the only person in an absolute panic over the Internet Archive and, specifically, the Wayback Machine? I rely on it so much for personal and research projects.

No ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

You're not. I rely on it very heavily for research and also for saving references to protect against linkrot. If that site stays down, a tremendous part of the internet will fall apart.

I've been saving things on Ghost and Archive.Today, but neither of those are very reliable, and they all save different kinds of things. Frex, Wayback is terrible at saving pictures while Archive.Today is good at that, but only Wayback will save PDF files. Also, Wayback is by far the biggest and oldest archive; the others have far less material saved.

Also, for me the loss of Wayback would mean a massive amount of work wasted saving things. >_< I really hope they get it restored.