You’ve Heard Of The Wayback Machine, Now Meet Archive Team

You probably already know about the Wayback machine <https://archive.org/>. You might think of them as the “respectable” side of trying to save snapshots of old websites: they respect robots.txt and takedown demands. Well, now meet the, um, more “wild and woolly” side with the same mission: Archive Team <https://archiveteam.org/>. They describe themselves as ... a loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage. Since 2009 this variant force of nature has caught wind of shutdowns, shutoffs, mergers, and plain old deletions - and done our best to save the history before it's lost forever. Along the way, we've gotten attention, resistance, press and discussion, but most importantly, we've gotten the message out: IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY. I just heard about them because they were trying to save all the X-rated blogs on tumblr.com before these disappeared, on orders of new owner Verizon. The company tried to block them from achieving this mission, but they found a way around the block (NSFW language) <https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20181216/22420341242/as-final-fuck-you-to-free-speech-tumblr-verizon-blocked-archivists.shtml>.

On Wed, 19 Dec 2018 12:38:47 +1300, I wrote:
You probably already know about the Wayback machine <https://archive.org/>. You might think of them as the “respectable” side of trying to save snapshots of old websites: they respect robots.txt and takedown demands.
Well, now meet the, um, more “wild and woolly” side with the same mission: Archive Team <https://archiveteam.org/>.
OK, let me amend that: it seems they make use of archive.org to host the backups. So they can’t really be playing fast and loose with takedown demands, they simply try to act as a feed point for sites that archive.org itself might not have got around to preserving.
participants (1)
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro