I’ve been a fan and supporter of the Wayback Machine for years.
If you’re not familiar with it, the Wayback Machine is the digital archive of the World Wide Web.
Created in 1996 by the Internet Archive nonprofit organization, the Wayback Machine was made public in 2001 and allows people to save pages as well as see how a page looks like in the past.
There’s no cost to save pages you want to reference in the future.
You can sign up for your own free Internet Archive account to create and save your own:
- Collections
- Posts
- Web Archives
that you can find quickly once you log in to your account.
Why I’m a Fan
Which is what reminded this week me why I’ve been a fan of the Wayback Machine for so many years.
I was reviewing one of my older blog posts, How to Find Your First Tweet, when I discovered my first tweet had been deleted.
Causing a broken link.
But I didn’t delete my first tweet.
Given the ongoing issues on the site formerly known as Twitter, I’m assuming something happened on their end resulting in my tweet getting deleted.
Which wasn’t an issue, because I quickly found a version of my first tweet on the Wayback Machine.
And updated my post with the link to the Wayback Machine link.
Phew!
I was glad I took the time a few years ago to backup my first tweet on the Wayback Machine.
As for the site formerly known as Twitter, I downloaded my archive in October 2022.
I’m likely not going to back up 200,000+ tweets to the Wayback Machine, but I may follow these steps (or something similar) for hosting my own Twitter archive site.
Wrapping Up
If you have important public online content or resources you want to make sure you have access to in the future, I strongly recommend you consider backing it up on the Wayback Machine.
