Internet Archive's way cool Wayback Machine gets way more websites in Cloudflare fail-over pact

The Internet Archive, repository for some 468bn webpages, has become a fail-over service for Cloudflare customers, which could improve website availability for everyone. On Thursday, Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine at the non-profit Internet Archive, said the archive's web-focused warehouse, the Wayback Machine, …

[Anonymous Coward]

Alms

" Internet Archive's arrangement with Cloudflare doesn't entail any financial or infrastructure support."

Cloudflare isn't making a profit yet but its billionaire owner could surely throw a chunk of change their way. It's even tax deductible (in the US, at least).

[Gene Cash]

Daaaaaannnnggg

Four hundred and sixty eight billion webpages. That's almost half a trillion pages. That's an accomplishment that doesn't get the recognition it deserves.

[Stuart Halliday]

Backups good....

Long overlooked, Archive is the best!

[Falmari]

Wayback Machine who cares

Who cares today? In the old days of the internet yes, but today its all commercial companies if they need pages stored let them do it.

On second thought, it's good to remember when these companies fuck up on the web in so many ways. Carry on Wayback Machine.

[Martin Summers]

Re: Wayback Machine who cares

Well although you have put the joke icon, in a sense you're right. There's a lot on the Web now that is just commercial crap. When I started using the Web in the 90's there was lots going on that captured the Internet and the people who used it in personal Web pages (even Geocities!). You don't get that really anymore, Facebook and MySpace etc killed off the personal Web page and no-one bothered to put the effort in again. People cringe when they remember the animated GIFs and banners proclaiming 'this page is under construction' and several logos for the browsers your site works best in. I miss it. I remember when I made my first website on the AOL hometown Web space I had (oddly only AOL would work on my 486 loaded from floppies to get me barely online), and some random person from the US contacted me about some of the content I put on there. The Web was exciting back then, a bit wild but a community of like minded people nonetheless. What are they really archiving now that we will want to see in the future that isn't behind a paywall/walled garden or some such? From what I've seen of Wayback machine, sadly it missed a lot of what made up pages back then, images etc, through no fault of their own of course. The interesting bit of the Web, it's history, it's roots, that was the bit that was worth saving. We are going to lose a lot of our culture the day no one can or wants to pay the bills to keep the electrons flowing within this project.

[Falmari]

Re: Wayback Machine who cares

Martin I agree and I also miss the web of old,

I was also being serious in my post just tried to write it in the way of a joke hence the joke icon. :)

[William Towle]

Re: Wayback Machine who cares

> People cringe when they remember the animated GIFs and banners proclaiming 'this page is under construction' and several logos for the browsers your site works best in. I miss it.

Likewise. As a Facebook refusenik to this day I actively maintained an Angelfire site for years, and mentioned writing the site generation scripts for it in on my CV. Some of my less-publicised efforts were even spidered by web.archive.org (surprisingly in some cases).

I have since digressed into LinkedIn for a professional homepage; wordpress.com for a blog (replacing slashdot's journal); and github for code uploads (replacing freshmeat+AF), though I note that the Angelfire pages are still live and modifiable. I'm fairly sure I hadn't come anywhere near the Angelfire storage limit, there's only just enough to keep the pages as-is now - so they're still there, albeit with the obligatory "now elsewhere" links where applicable of course...