This is a work-in-progress guide developed in response to research concerns about at-risk data sets hosted online, with significant contributions by Yale Library's Born Digital Archives Advisory Group.

If you have further questions, please feel free to reach out or schedule a consultation.

Note: check for existing archived copies of your materials of interest, or for preservation initiatives targeting those materials, before striking out on your own!

Wayback Machine

Quick facts: all can access, all can contribute, externally hosted

The Wayback Machine is a web archive created by the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization. It offers user-friendly access to archived webpages. As well as running automated web crawls to collect websites, the Wayback Machine allows users to save pages at specific URLs upon request, and to add snapshots to its archive.

The Wayback Machine also offers an API to check if a page appears in its archives with code

Archive-It

Quick facts: all can access, collecting organizations can contribute, externally hosted

Collecting organizations can also curate their own or others' cultural heritage resources online with Archive-It, another Internet Archive service. As well as offering captured sites, these collections curate websites into collections around particular topics.

HTTrack

Quick facts: produces a local copy

HTTrack is a free, copylefted tool that allows you to download copies of websites, including the original link structure, to your own computer. More interactive sites may or may not be captured as effectively, and the tool may sometimes miss links, so be sure to check your results.

Conifer

Quick facts: produces a hosted copy of interactive content

Conifer is a web archiving tool developed by Rhizome, a new media arts not-for-profit, that captures an interactive copy of web content following your own browsing, rather than an automated web crawler.

Conifer can perform better than other web archiving tools for some kinds of interactive content.

Conifer offers 5GB of free storage for archived web content, which you can share with others online. More storage is available by subscription.

If you have additional questions, feel free to email or book a consultation.