What Is WayBack Machine? How To Use it?

The way back machine is a archive website that stores digital files and website screenshots.Basically it helps you see how a particular website looked in past .Launched on October 2001 it enables you to check website history from 1996. As of 2009, the Wayback device contained approximately 3 petabytes (1000 TB) of statistics and was growing at a rate of 100 terabytes every month. This is the reason We are coming up with an article in which I am going to tell you about What is WayBack Machine? How to use it?

The increase rate reported in 2003 became 12 terabytes/month. The information is stored on PetaBox rack systems manufactured by Capricorn technology

Benefits of Wayback machine:

1. You can check how a website looked in past
2. You can save your own website in their archive to check at later stage
3. Files are stored on their super storage system so even if original website goes down,The cached copy is still available to read

How to use Wayback machine:

1.To check a website history

To start using way back machine first of all head over to archive.org

• Here you have to enter the website url you want to check history of.for example we will use facebook.com in our case
• So we will enter www.facebook.com in the search bar and click on “Go”
• Now it will show you huge list of cached pages from their database.Just select any date from there and u will see how that website looked like on that date

• Here is what Facebook looked like on 1 Jan 2006

2.To save your page to Waybackmachine:

To save your website in waybackmachine cached database head over to archive.org/web . Here you will find a box to enter your page URL. Enter your website URL in the box and click on “Save Page”’

Now way back machine will start crawling your link and save it into their database.Once the crawling and indexing is done, The archived copy link will be provided In a popup box .If your archive is a PDF file then you will find the link in location bar

This is effectively free of cost method to save your website history online.Using this feature it will be assured that the page or PDF file that you archived will be available to read at later stage

Another way to save a page is to add a bookmarklet in your browser.To add the bookmarklet head over toWaybackmachine bookmarklet .Now just drag and drop the bookmarklet button to your browser bookmarks bar .After that you can save any page from your browser directly without even visiting archive.org .Just click on the bookmarklet on the page and that page will be automatically saved to waybackmachine.Thus this is less time consuming and easy to use

Another site like way back machine is archive.is .This project is similar to archive.org but it downloads the files available on webpage like images,PDF,zips etc.You can check the the cached file at later date with all the files that were archived before.It also provides tools like taking screenshot,downloading the webpage into zip file,Bookmarklet and an option to check your page on different caching websites. 

Conclusion:

In this article all we wanted to share was that you can easily save your website in a archived database so if something wrong goes you can easily check it at later stage.It also helps you to check how a website changed drastically over a period of time

Thank you for visiting and keep visiting for more tips and tricks like this and I will meet you in the next one.