Archive.today

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Revision as of 01:41, 30 April 2019 by ATrescue (talk | contribs) (→‎Issues: Adding information about the behaviour of Archive.is that they could improve on.)
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Archive.is
Archive-is 2013-07-02 17-05-40.png
URL archive.is[IAWcite.todayMemWeb]
Status Online!
Archiving status Not saved yet
Archiving type Unknown
IRC channel #archiveteam-bs (on hackint)

Archive.is is a privately funded on-demand archiving site, similar to WebCite. One key difference is that it stores "Web 2.0" pages better than WebCite; it also supports zip downloads of entire individual webpages and takes a screenshot of the webpage. It is equipped with a text searching feature, powered by Google and also Yandex, which it switches to if Google delivers 0 search results. Unlike on the Wayback Machine, search engines are able to index Archive.is. It does not store PDFs, binary files, Adobe Flash content, videos, or sounds. The maximum size of a webpage it will archive (including images) is 50MB. Additionally, Archive.is forwards your IP address to the submitted website in a X-Forwarded-For header.[1]

The website shot up significantly in popularity in the second half of 2014 primarily due to the GamerGate controversy. As of Feb. 2015, the website has archived about 200 "Tb" of data. It is likely 200 Terabyte TB, not Terabit Tb as is quoted. Nonetheless, if accurate, 200Tb ≈ 25TB.

For additional confusion, "5Tb" is apparently the site's weekly growth.

On April 14, 2014, Archive.is changed its name to Archive.today due to attacks against ISNIC[2][3], and then changed its name back to the original Archive.is some time later.

Vital Signs

Note that the site is a commercial enterprise, and as such can go kaputt at any given point, especially if it does not find a lucrative business model. Although it's not a strong indication of long-term issues; in October 2016 the site "made transparent" the server costs, and started to accept donations. A weekly crowdfunded target of $800[4] is set to maintain the site.

Prior to this, the site actively refused donations. A donation link took the user to an animal shelter donation page[5].

In January 2017 the administrator commented in response to a censorship query that the site had "just run out of CPU for the browsers." - With problems capturing pages, it is unclear if this is a temporary issue.


Funding

According to their FAQ:

It is privately funded, there in no complex finance behind it. It may look more or less reliable compared to the startup-style funding or an univercity project, depending on which risks are taken into account. My death can cause interruption of service, but something like new market condition or changing head of a department can not.

As of October 2016 the site has a 'liberapay'[6] donation link at the top-right corner of the page.

Stated in January 2017, through donations the site only receives "more than $1.50 every day, enough for a bowl of phở".

Site structure

A list of all domains currently archived is available here.

List of all domains from archive.is/alldomains (as of 2014/02/20) = 7,255,826 domains

Sadly, the url counts from /alldomains are out of date.

All sitemaps (as of 2014/02/17)

As a side note, the administrator is unsupportive of Internet Archive's robots.txt policy - which could hinder future backup cooperation.

Issues

As of 17 Feb, 2016 archive.today domain name is unavailable since 16 Feb, likely due to "fake DMCA requests" (copy 1, copy 2), [1].


Sometimes, the page indicates “loading” when trying to access the page, instead of showing the page itself.

When the archival of a page has not been successful (e.g. “ Error: time out.”, “ Error: network error.”), the existing information (network transfer and already downloaded ressources) get discarded and the taget URL of the page archival indicates “Not Found (yet?)”, the same it shows on pages that have never been archived, similarly to how YouTube behaves.

Unlike Google Cache, Archive.is does not store the original source codes. Also the list of network transfers (shown during archival process) that shows the HTTP status, MIME type, object size (Bytes) and the URL of page elements. File names of saved (embedded) auxiliary page elements get changed into an SHA-1-hashsum of the file itself, discarding the original file names of images.

Since 2016, the Wayback Machine is unable to access Archive.is due to captcha.

Archives

/alldomains Archive

References