Archive.today

Archive.today
archive.today (or archive.is) is a web archiving site, founded in 2012, that saves snapshots on demand, and has support for JavaScript-heavy sites such as Google Maps and progressive web apps such as Twitter. archive.today records two snapshots: one replicates the original webpage including any functional live links; the other is a screenshot of the page.
History
Archive.today was founded in 2012. The site originally branded itself as archive.today, but in May 2015, changed the primary mirror to archive.is.
In January 2019, it began to deprecate the archive.is domain in favor of other mirrors.
Features
Functionality
Archive.today can capture individual pages in response to explicit user requests. Since its beginning, it has supported crawling pages with URLs containing the now-deprecated hash-bang fragment.
Archive.today records only text and images, excluding XML, RTF, spreadsheet (xls or ods) and other non-static content. However, videos for certain sites, like Twitter, are saved. It keeps track of the history of snapshots saved, requesting confirmation before adding a new snapshot of an already saved page.
Pages are captured at a browser width of 1,024 pixels. CSS is converted to inline CSS, removing responsive web design and selectors such as :hover and :active. Content generated using JavaScript during the crawling process appears in a frozen state.
HTML class names are preserved inside the old-class attribute.
When text is selected, a JavaScript applet generates a URL fragment seen in the browser's address bar that automatically highlights that portion of the text when visited again.
Web pages cannot be duplicated from archive.today to web.archive.org as second-level backup, as archive.today places an exclusion for Wayback Machine and does not save its snapshots in WARC format. The reverse—from web.archive.org to archive.today—is possible, but the copy usually takes more time than a direct capture. Some web sites get deleted from Internet Archive's listings retroactively or blocked from being saved due to their robots.txt file, but archive.today does not use this.
The research toolbar enables advanced keywords operators, using as the wildcard character. A couple of quotation marks address the search to an exact sequence of keywords present in the title or in the body of the webpage, whereas the insite operator restricts it to a specific Internet domain.
Once a web page is archived, it cannot be deleted directly by any Internet user.
Removing advertisements, popups or expanding links from archived pages is possible by asking the owner to do it on his blog.
While saving a dynamic list, archive.today search box shows only a result that links the previous and the following section of the list (e.g. 20 links for page). The other web pages saved are filtered, and sometimes may be found by one of their occurrences.
The search feature is backed by Google CustomSearch. If it delivers no results, archive.today attempts to utilize Yandex Search.
While saving a page, a list of URLs for individual page elements and their content sizes, HTTP statuses and MIME types is shown. This list can only be viewed during the crawling process.
One can download archived pages as a ZIP file, except pages archived when archive.today changed their browser engine from PhantomJS to Chromium.
In July 2013, Archive.today began supporting the API of the Memento Project.
Worldwide availability
Australia
In March 2019, the site was blocked for six months by several Australian internet providers in the aftermath of the Christchurch mosque shootings in an attempt to limit distribution of the footage of the attack. It has since been unblocked.
China
According to GreatFire.org, archive.today has been blocked in China archive.li archive.fo as well as archive.ph
Finland
On 21 July 2015, the operators blocked access to the service from all Finnish IP addresses, stating on Twitter that they did this in order to avoid escalating a dispute they allegedly had with the Finnish government.
Russia
In Russia, only HTTP access is possible; HTTPS connections are blocked. HTTP is not encrypted, contrary to HTTPS, therefore agents listening on the network can read and modify in-transit the whole communication, including the URL of the page requested, the returned content, and strings that identify the sender device (such as the User-Agent and cookies).
Cloudflare DNS availability
Between May 2018 and May 2022, Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS service would not resolve the organizations web addresses, making it inaccessible to users of the Cloudflare DNS service. Both organizations claimed the other was responsible for the issue. Cloudflare staff stated that the problem was on archive.today's DNS infrastructure, as its authoritative nameservers return invalid records when Cloudflare's network systems made requests to archive.today. archive.today countered that the issue was due to Cloudflare requests not being compliant with DNS standards, as Cloudflare does not send EDNS Client Subnet information in its DNS requests. The issue was subsequently resolved.
See also
Digital preservation
List of Web archiving initiatives
Link rot
Perma.cc
Wayback Machine
Web archiving
WebCite
References
External links
archive.today at archiveteam.org
archive.ph/faq
"archive.today: On the trail of the mysterious guerrilla archivist of the Internet", Gyrovague, August 5, 2023
History of the Internet
Internet properties established in 2012
Tor onion services
Web archiving initiatives