I don’t really understand very well how it works. Is people actually saving my website or is it automatic? And if so why is mine being saved but not my friend’s?
In: Technology
Both. There are bots that crawl popular pages and save them regularly. For other pages, you can manually save it. If you try pulling up an un-archived page on the Wayback Machine (like this post, as of January 24, 2024 00:39 Neopia Standard Time) it’ll tell you
“Hrm. Wayback Machine has not archived that URL.”
followed by
“This page is available on the web! Help make the Wayback Machine more complete!”
and a button you can click that says “Save this URL in the Wayback Machine”.
Any rando out there can plug in a URL and click that button. Maybe someone saw something on your site that they wanted to make sure was recorded for posterity.
I highly recommend their FAQ page: https://help.archive.org/help/category/the-wayback-machine/
There are just a buncha giant servers with pretty blinking lights hanging out in San Francisco with all this info. There are pictures of them and some more technical bits here: https://blog.archive.org/2020/11/16/where-your-donation-goes/
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