What is Wayback Machine and Why We Use Internet Archives?

Have you ever deleted a page on your site by chance? And you don’t have a backup but wish you could restore it again?

What would you do now?

Don’t worry we have good news for you there are platforms on the internet you can visit to see how your site pages appeared in the past. You could use them to copy your lost data and restore it. One of the platforms that makes this possible is Wayback Machine. In this post, we are going to discuss what the Wayback machine is and how to use it to look at the website’s past.

Table of Contents

What is Wayback Machine?

Wayback machines work as an internet archive that stores the copies of millions of Web pages. It was founded by a non-profit organization called Internet Archive in San Francisco, California in 1996 by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat and launched for the 1st time for the public in 2001. It is an online platform that gives permission to the user to travel back in time and see how their website looked in the past. Users can access the content that has been published on the website that is no longer available.

You can easily search your lost websites on the Wayback Machine, simply open the website and enter the URL of your website into the search bar and select Search archived websites in the drop-down menu. or click on the Web icon on the upper left side of the black bar. Enter the correct URL into the Wayback Machine search bar there you will get your website.

It is important to have access to the Wayback machine all time but sadly, no one can guarantee that a website won’t ever be down If the Wayback machine is down, then you also take a look for another Internet Time Machine website.

Why We Use Internet Archives?

There can be various reasons to uses it, some of which are following:

It can Access web pages or sites that are accidentally deleted or removed from the internet and help in finding lost information, and viewing down-website content.
We can learn the progress of rivals, to see how a specific website looked in the past.
It preserves all the assets and creates a reference for researchers, scholars, etc.
It is very useful to download resources that are no longer available.

Recover website from Wayback Machine

The Internet Archive, also known as the Wayback Machine takes snapshots of websites across the internet and may have store a copy of your website. So, follow these steps and we’ll help you how to search for archives and recover your content from the Wayback Machine. You can then use these steps to rebuild your website from scratch.

Step 1 Open the Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web.
Step 2 Past your website link in the search box and then click the Browse History button. It will list how many times your website was saved over a time period. For example:
“Saved 50 times between November 9, 2018, and March 08, 2022.“
Step 3 You will also see a timeline and a calendar. Click the year to view what dates your site was archived.
Step 4 Click the date on the calendar to view a snapshot of what was saved. You can try to open the website to view the available content. Keep in mind, it may not look the same as your website since it depends on what was archived at the time.
Step 5 I recommend you check each year and date to ensure you find all of the content.

Restore website from wayback machine manually

Now that you know how to find your website snapshots on the internet archive (Wayback Machine), you can begin copying the text and images to your computer.

Step 1 Open each page of the website and copy the text, then paste it into a text editor such as Notepad, MS Word, Google Docs Or any content editor.
Step 2 Visit each page in the Internet Archive (Wayback Machine) then right-click and save any images you want to recover to your computer folder.
Step 3 In some cases, you may be able to recover some of the website code. Right-click then select View page source to view the website code. Save it to your text editor for later use.

Download website from Wayback using Wayback Machine Download

And now if you want to download your website and want to save your time thank select a snapshot of your website that you want to restore. And open Waybackmachinedownload.net and follow these steps

Step 1 Put your website link in the order form
Step 2 Select the type, if you need to download just a static website (Html, CSS, js, images, etc) you can select “Html”. ANd If you want to restore your website in WordPress select the type “WordPress” and hit the “Pay now” button and
Step 3 Continue to the checkout page to complete your order.

Now that you know how to find and recover website content from the Wayback Machine (Internet Archive), you can begin rebuilding your site. Hopefully, your site will return to its former glory with help from the archived copy.