Tools

Website in the web archive

Enter an address to see when the Wayback Machine saved the home page, how many snapshots exist and when the last working version was captured. Handy when a site is gone and there is no backup.

You can paste a full link, we will take the domain from it. We only query the web archive and never contact the site itself.

(02) — Details

What the web archive is

The Wayback Machine is run by the non-profit Internet Archive. Since 1996 its crawlers have been visiting websites and saving copies of pages. Popular sites are saved many times a day, small ones every few months or less often.

A snapshot is a copy of a page at the moment the crawler came by: text, layout and some of the images and styles.

What the archive is good for

  • Restoring a website that vanished along with its hosting when there were no backups.
  • Finding old texts, prices, contacts or pages removed in a redesign.
  • Seeing how the site looked before a hack or a bad edit.
  • Checking a domain's history before buying it.

What the archive does not have

The archive keeps what visitors see, not what sits on the server. There is no database, no user accounts, carts or orders, no search results or forms. Some images, scripts and styles may be missing too.

So restoring from the archive means assembling a static copy from snapshots of different dates, then finishing it by hand: missing images, working forms, moving it to hosting.

(03) — Questions

Questions.

Why are there so few snapshots?
Crawlers visit small websites rarely. You can save a page by hand with the Save Page Now form on web.archive.org. It is also worth setting up proper backups: the archive does not replace them.
Can a website be restored from the archive?
Yes, if there are snapshots of a working version, shown in green on the chart. Texts, images, layout and structure can be brought back. Databases, orders and user accounts cannot.
Why does the latest snapshot show an error?
On the day the crawler came, the site was down, returned an error or redirected elsewhere. Go by the last working version.
Are inner pages counted?
No, we show the history of the home page. The archive keeps inner pages separately: you can find them in the snapshot calendar linked in the result.
How do I remove a site from the web archive?
A site owner can ask the Internet Archive to exclude it. The archive.org help pages explain how.
(04) — Studio

Website gone and no backups?

We will rebuild a working copy of your site from web archive snapshots, move it to new hosting and set up backups so this does not happen again.

Message on Telegram → Message on MAX
Website restoration from the web archive ↗ Website support ↗