Recently, many users around the world were shocked when the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine stopped working due to a hacktivist's attempted sabotage. Wayback Machine is one of the free and open tools that exist to be able to consult practically any website on the Internet, including many that for one reason or another have disappeared from the network or are no longer available. But Wayback Machine is not the only option we have to consult disappeared websites, and we are going to tell you what these other alternatives are.
There are many reasons why a website can disappear overnight. The most obvious possibility is that it has been taken down by an administration due to a fine for pirated content, but it could also be due to a cyber attack, the website owner forgetting to pay for the domain name, or the author deleting the content at his own discretion.
An example of such a case is MTV News, the popular news website about music and pop culture, which suddenly closed down, causing great disappointment to fans and even historians, as they could no longer access the huge amount of archives, articles and interviews with all kinds of figures that had been there for years. Another example is that of an online newspaper that publishes a news item and, due to some problem, decides to delete the article.
The magnitude of the problem can also be seen from Wikipedia, knowing that around 11% of the links included in articles in the online encyclopedia no longer redirect to any site, since the content has been deleted or moved.
As explained by the cybersecurity company Kaspersky, this phenomenon has a name: "link rot", through which we can lose access or the real address of a website we wanted to visit.
If there is a website that we wanted to consult and we have saved it in a list of pending readings or similar, it will be a great disappointment to try to access it again and see that it is no longer possible. It is in this context that the tools that we are going to discuss here will be useful to us, and that, like Wayback Machine, we can use to recover web pages, but also to save them in the storage of our PC or mobile phone so as not to lose them ever.
Web page storage services
Kaspersky lists four online services that allow us to save websites for safekeeping. These are:
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Pocket, formerly called Read It Later.
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Wallabag (the only open source one, which allows you to install it on your server without having to pay).
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Raindrop.io.
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Evernote, through its “Web Clipper” feature.
These tools work in a very similar way. We simply have to enter the URL of the website we want to save and a file will be generated that we can save, and that will contain all the illustrations and other relevant elements, without incorporating advertising. The most recommended option is Wallabag because it is free and open source, since with the other options we will have to pay a premium subscription to be able to download the entire file.
On the other hand, if we don't just want to download a website to our PC, but we also want to save it and be able to share it easily with others, we can use services that save the website on their servers and that we can share through links. Some of them are:
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archive.org (the Wayback Machine we talked about at the beginning).
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archive.today
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perma.cc
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megalodon-jp
These websites will generate a new link to the saved content, which you can share with others and will still be available even if the original website deletes the content. Additionally, many of the websites mentioned also have browser extensions, which can save you time in the process.