Data collected in Archive-It crawls will be periodically indexed into the general Wayback Machine. Additionally, if a subscriber ends their service, their collections will be moved over to the general archive for public access via the Wayback Machine.

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is a service that allows people to visit archived versions of Web sites. Visitors to the Wayback Machine can type in a URL, select a date range, and then begin surfing on an archived version of the Web. Imagine surfing circa 1999 and looking at all the Y2K hype, or revisiting an older version of your favorite Web site. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine can make all of this possible.

The original idea for the Internet Archive Wayback Machine began in 1996, when the Internet Archive first began archiving the web. Now, five years later, with over 100 terabytes and a dozen web crawls completed, the Internet Archive has made the Internet Archive Wayback Machine available to the public. The Internet Archive has relied on donations of web crawls, technology, and expertise from Alexa Internet and others.

The Internet Archive actively seeks donations of digital materials for preservation. If you have digital materials that may be of interest to future generations, please let us know by sending an email to info at archive dot org. The Internet Archive is also seeking additional funding to continue this important mission. You can click the donate tab above or click here. Thank you for considering us in your charitable giving.

Alexa Internet, in cooperation with the Internet Archive, has designed a three dimensional index that allows browsing of web documents over multiple time periods, and turned this unique feature into the Wayback Machine.

Alexa Internet has been crawling the web since 1996, which has resulted in a massive archive. If you have a web site, and you would like to ensure that it is saved for posterity in the Internet Archive, and you've searched wayback and found no results, you can visit the Alexa's "Webmasters" page at http://pages.alexa.com/help/webmasters/index.html#crawl_site. Method 3: while visiting a site, use the 'show related links' in Internet Explorer, which uses the Alexa service.

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine contains almost 2 petabytes of data and is currently growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month. This eclipses the amount of text contained in the world's largest libraries, including the Library of Congress.

The Internet Archive respects the intellectual property rights and other proprietary rights of others. The Internet Archive may, in appropriate circumstances and at its discretion, remove certain content or disable access to content that appears to infringe the copyright or other intellectual property rights of others.

It generally takes 6 months or more for pages to appear in the Wayback Machine after they are collected, because of delays in transferring material to long-term storage and indexing.

Subscribers to this service can create distinct Web archives called "collections", containing only the content they are interested in harvesting, at whatever frequency suits their needs. All collections are full-text searchable. The collections created with Archive-It can be catalogued and managed directly by the subscriber. We keep a minimum of two copies of each collection online. None of these features are available in the general archive, accessed via the Wayback Machine.

Our contracted partner, Archive-It , sends its Heritrix spider to crawl a specified list of Montana state government domains. Crawls are made on a schedule specified by the Montana State Library. The crawls are stored and made accessible by full-text search in the Archive-It WayBack Machine .

By default, all collections are available for public access via text search from the main page at www.Archive-It.org. However, a subscriber can choose to have their collection(s) made private by special arrangement.

The Internet Archive is not interested in preserving or offering access to Web sites or other Internet documents of persons who do not want their materials in the collection. By placing a simple robots.txt file on your Web server, you can exclude your site from being crawled as well as exclude any historical pages from the Wayback Machine. Internet Archive uses the exclusion policy intended for use by both academic and non-academic digital repositories and archivists. See our exclusion policy.

Yes! The Wayback Machine is built so that it can be used and referenced. If you find an archived page that you would like to reference on your Web page or in an article, you can copy the URL. You can even use fuzzy URL matching and date specification... but that's a bit more advanced.

If you have Javascript turned off, images and links will be from the live web, not from our archive of old Web files. Not every date for every site archived is 100% complete. When you are surfing an incomplete archived site the Wayback Machine will grab the closest available date to the one you are in for the links that are missing. In the event that we do not have the link archived at all, the Wayback Machine will look for the link on the live web and grab it if available.

This question is a newer one. We asked MLA to help us with how to cite an archived URL in correct format. They did say that there is no established format for resources like the Wayback Machine, but it's best to err on the side of more information. You should cite the webpage as you would normally, and then give the Wayback Machine information. They provided the following example: McDonald, R. C. "Basic Canary Care." _Robirda Online_. 12 Sept. 2004. 18 Dec. 2006 . _Internet Archive_.

Societies have always placed importance on preserving their culture and heritage. But much early 20th-century media -- television and radio, for example -- was not saved. The Library of Alexandria -- an ancient center of learning containing a copy of every book in the world -- disappeared when it was burned to the ground.

The terms of use are the same terms in place for the general Web archive at Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/about/terms.php).

You only need to know the basic functions of the Wayback Machine. Begin by typing in a URL to search for into the Wayback Machine and hit the 'Take Me Back' button. Once you've found your choices on the results page, click the 'Compare Archive Pages' button in the upper right hand corner of the page. The reloaded page will have a series of check-boxes before each page date. Check any two dates and select the 'Compare two dates' button in the upper left-hand corner of the screen.

We have posted selected archival finding aids and inventories of our collections on this website, and more will be posted as they are completed. We also intend to put selected examples of each collection on the web. Visit the web page for each collection for more information.

All data created using the Archive-It service is hosted and stored by the Internet Archive. We store two copies online and are working with partners to have redundant copies in other locations at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt and other locations in the U.S. Subscribers can also request a copy of their data for local use and preservation either on a hard drive or over the internet.