The Wayback Machine is back as a read-only service after cyberattacks
The Wayback Machine is back online.
edit: adjusted title slightly
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Ok, serious question. Why is it normally read/write? I’ve always treated it as being read only.
I mean how else would they archive web sites or content?
Web crawling?
IA hosts TONS of user uploaded content. They’re not uploading those Gameboy ROMs themselves.
Live music archive is still down for example 😞
I’ve always thought they were a crawler.
The Wayback machine is a crawler, which is big part of what they do but not everything. The Wayback machine crawls its own pages, but you can also submit URLs to be crawled.
The other part of what they do is hosting a significant number of digital archives of media that is no longer sold / in print / distributed. Much of that content is user uploaded. Like “oh hey I found this old clip art cd from the early 90s. I don’t really have a use for it, but if this doesn’t get uploaded somewhere it’s probably going to be lost to time. I’ll submit it to the internet archives.”
They do some crawling themselves, but Archive Team (a third party group) does a lot of web archiving as well.
My most frequent use case of the IA in general is the Cover Art Archive, and I frequently upload cover art for albums to the CAA via MusicBrainz. That's how I discovered the IA was down, when an upload failed.