Obviously a ton of stuff has been uploaded to the internet but you can still find things online from the beginning, on internet archive or looking up « cached »? Webpages? How does this work, where is it stored to be available and how can everything be saved – I’m so confused!
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A webpage is just a file.
An archived webpage is just a copy of that file on a different computer.
Sites like the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine take snapshot copies of webpages — both the text and the images — periodically and store them on super-large-capacity machines called “servers.” These machines are connected to the internet and are publicly accessible.
When you visit the Wayback Machine and enter a webpage link, you’re given a date option that also shows the amount of traffic the site/page got on that particular day, so you can choose based on popularity of a particular time/snapshot.
The copying system isn’t perfect so not every bit of text or image makes it to the servers, and people can request that things *not* be archived, and some aspects of websites cannot easily be copied, so not everything is archived.
The above is how a website that lives on a server on June 1, 1998, can still be seen on November 28, 2023, on the Wayback Machine, even if the original website no longer exists.
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