My Tips for the Wayback Machine

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TalkOrBell
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Joined: Fri Jul 19, 2019 9:52 am

My Tips for the Wayback Machine

#1 Post by TalkOrBell »

Hello Peeps...

I have done alot of digging on the wayback machine for years so now I will share some tips...I will also refer to this thread in many posts so I don't have to keep repeating it...

Much in the way of resources can be had as far as freeware & RARE freeware as well on the wayback. Much you never heard of plus it's a goodie for getting older versions that will work in older OS as there will always be "AHHH...They dropped support for XP!!!"...or "Hey they USED TO store the older versions on their servers...Now they're GONE!".

First to say that the wayback machine is a pretty stable & reliable FILEHOSTER...Probably longer lasting & certainly unchanged for a short eternity...

However it DOES go down for maintenance, or a problem. It was down most of the day yesterday. So if you can't access it then forget about it for a day then try again, but if it is down DO NOT CALL THE POLICE!...Errr, just kidding but in a way not. Any of you remember about a year ago youtube went down for a day or less in an area and people were CALLING THE POLICE!

Unbelievable & how does one recover from that information? HAVE A SHORT MEMORY!

So...Secondly it is ALWAYS advisable to Right-Click Open in NEW TAB or WINDOW for any downloading as for many browsers & situations you can get a dummy file by using 'Save Link As'...If you are getting similar sized files either 11KB for small stuff or 1.024KB for larger those are corrupt dummy files...

Thirdly...Right-Click Open in New Tab most the time will show different snapshot 'hits' on the top bar. If your file did not come in as expected then hit the next logical snapshot...In more lesser cases you might have to try every one! If the wayback machine redirects & it looks to be accessing the right file then let it...If you see it redirecting to 'error-404' or 'trannyporncentral.com' then stop the loading or close window.

Fourth...Many many pages will have missing images. This is a pain if you are needing some old tutorials but remember that just because an image is missing that the download link behind it may be just fine...

Fifth...You must know WHERE YOU ARE GOING...The wayback will not help you out. You must have a link to punch in. If it is too general it might zip you up to a 2019 listing where a more specific PAGE of the website will be more close without redirecting AWAY from where you need to be...

Sixth...The wayback machine is rippable. In some cases I know the archives are THERE...But I cannot find the right links or years so I setup teleport ultra to search for certain archives & 'however many links away from starting URL''. This has saved me a buncha times but you will also have alot of garbage to parse through & delete...

There's more but I tire as I am a hunt & pecker typer...

TalkOrBell

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webfork
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Re: My Tips for the Wayback Machine

#2 Post by webfork »

This is a solid guide, thanks. I've been using archive.org for a long time and I never thought to post recommendations on it's use.
There's more but I tire as I am a hunt & pecker typer...
I appreciate the effort. There are a host of voice-to-text tools out there. If you have an Office 365 account, it has included dictation. There's also a website (Chrome only) viewtopic.php?f=6&t=23578

bitcoin
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Re: My Tips for the Wayback Machine

#3 Post by bitcoin »

fwiw, last i checked there was a program on the linux side that would let you download entire websites that had been archived by the Wayback Machine, but i couldn't find one on Windows at the time. this was about a year ago

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webfork
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Re: My Tips for the Wayback Machine

#4 Post by webfork »

bitcoin wrote: Mon Feb 10, 2020 5:07 pm fwiw, last i checked there was a program on the linux side that would let you download entire websites that had been archived by the Wayback Machine, but i couldn't find one on Windows at the time. this was about a year ago
That would be useful. I couldn't find anything definitive, but did find a superuser discussion on the topic: https://superuser.com/questions/828907/ ... ck-machine

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vevy
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Re: My Tips for the Wayback Machine

#5 Post by vevy »

vevy wrote: Thu Sep 10, 2020 1:45 pm If you want to quickly check (with some accuracy) if there is (or was) a site with a certain word in the domain or subdomain, enter it in the Wayback Machine search box.

It may help you find useful historical (or current) resources on some really obscure topics.
viewtopic.php?t=25169&p=98309#p98309

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rbon
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Re: My Tips for the Wayback Machine

#6 Post by rbon »

I have seen a recent post on Major Geeks about Wayback Machine for Chrome (and Chromium), Firefox, Safari and Android and I have investigate about this.

• Softpedia: https://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/ ... hive.shtml
• Major Geeks: https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/detail ... chine.html
--> Major Geeks has updated links for these extensions that You can find at https://archive.org/web/
• Extension for Chrome/Chromium: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/deta ... lkndpkmiak
• Extension for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... chine_new/

About these extensions:
[Chrome/Chromium]
The official Chrome extension of the Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive:
• Reduce annoying 404 pages by automatically checking for an archived copy in the Wayback Machine.
• Detects dead pages, 404s, DNS failures and other Web breakdowns (HTTP error codes 408, 410, 451, 500, 502, 503, 504, 509, 520, 521, 523, 524, 525, and 526)
• If we have a Wayback Machine archive of a URL that returns those error codes we will offer it to you.
• In addition you can view a site map of Web sites based on archives of URLs from those sites archived in the Wayback Machine.
• current release of Chrome/Chromium extension is 2.13.

[Firefox]
• Detects dead pages, 404s, DNS failures & a range of other web breakdowns, offering to show archived versions via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
• In addition you can archive web pages, and see their most recent & first archives.
• current release of Firefox extension is 1.8.6.

Note:
For obtain a backup copy of these extensions You must:
1. For Chrome/Chromium:
- go to www.crx4chrome.com
- in box 'Search crx file' type 'Wayback Machine'
- download page for ver 2.13: https://www.crx4chrome.com/crx/44614/
- rename downloaded crx as 'Wayback Machine 2.13.crx'
2. For Firefox:
- open Firefox
- go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... chine_new/
- right-click on 'Add to Firefox'
- Save link as (file): wayback_machine-1.8.6-an+fx.xpi

I have seen the Chrome/Chromium extension and it's very nice. 8)
"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to build bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning." - Rick Cook.

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Midas
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Re: My Tips for the Wayback Machine

#7 Post by Midas »

Piece of related news...

The partnership with Cloudflare will also enable the Wayback Machine to find even more websites to crawl, a boon to the Internet Archive. For more than two decades, the Wayback Machine has archived as much of the public web as it can, adding more than a billion URLs a day to the corpus. In all, the archive contains more than 468 billion web pages and more than 45 petabytes of data.

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vevy
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Re: My Tips for the Wayback Machine

#8 Post by vevy »

Interesting read. From the quote, I thought the IA is using CF for uptime and availability (given the server issues IA seems to be having recently). But after reading it is closer to the other way around.

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