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Wayback Machine saves 150000 GB of webpages every day
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this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
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Technology
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I recently was searching for evidence of web existence of a site, and of course Wayback was my first thought. So I put in the address, and couldn't find anything relevant (a redirection error was the best hit I got). Then I realized, duh... What I was looking for was in the late 90s, maybe 2000, and the notion of preserving the web hadn't become a thing yet. So this is what happens without such efforts, things are really lost to memory and maybe snippets of references here and there if lucky.
The Wayback Machine started saving web pages in 1996. I’ve got Geocities pages I created at the time where that’s the only way I can access them now.
The frustrating thing for me is that Wayback only saved web pages; all the Gopher pages and FTP pages just vanished.
They started in 2001 archiving pages back to 1995. I guess it was luck of the draw what got saved then.
They used existing archives; the pages were actually archived earlier. But they could only incorporate the pages that had actually been archived, which was mostly major services (Geocities, ProHosting, Lycos, etc) and public institutions.
That makes sense, from why some things were captured more than others and from the pov of starting an archive service - using what's already been done and going from there. So things that weren't part of such a network and didn't rank high in existing search engines really didn't have a chance.