So, the Wayback Machine. It crawls through the internet and saves stuff. Sometimes it has the thing you want. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it says it doesn’t but still does. So what can you do?
Shake the internet until it falls out, of course.
I use a Wayback Machine search plug-in for Firefox so I can just paste in the
address and go. If I’m lucky, the archive serves up the saved page without a
fuss. If I’m not so lucky, I have to go digging for it myself because
there’s still a chance it’s been archived. Unfortunately, the site isn’t very intuitive, so it takes some work.
Here are two tricks
I’ve learned:
1) When you’re viewing a saved page on the Wayback Machine, you’ll have a URL that looks something like this:
But maybe that’s not the most recent grab, or maybe it’s just a big sad face because the archive was down that day. To see all the saves for that page, all you have to do is replace that big spew of numbers (hint, it’s the save date) with an asterisk so you get something like this:
That’ll take you to the calendar page that displays the dates that page has been crawled, and you can see if there’s a newer or older save that has what you want. Just click on the colored dates on the calendar. The years above the calendar are clickable, too. If the year has a bar graph over it, that means there are saves from that year. No bars means no saves.
2) Next–and this is messy but it can pay off–sometimes you end up here:
[image: Wayback Machine screenshot: “Hrm. Wayback Machine doesn’t have that page archived. Want to search for all archived pages under ao3.org/works?”]
Now, that means the exact URL you’re looking for isn’t there. In this case, it’s because it’s a chaptered work on the AO3, so the Wayback Machine won’t have it saved under that particular URL. (More on this later.) It might have it saved another way, though. You don’t want to search all the AO3 saves because that’s nuts, but the AO3 often has all sorts of things it adds on to the end of URLs, so add an asterisk to the end of the AO3 URL and hit return. Your new URL will look like this:
And, depending on how lucky you are, you’ll get this nasty business:
[image: Wayback Machine screenshot: “378 URLs have been captured for this domain.”]
That’s right: 378 URLs have been captured for this domain. And that goes on for quite some time. Eight pages of it as it happens. And only a few of those relate to the page I’m looking for. This is because my work id was 4582 and the Wayback Machine is giving me every saved AO3 page that starts with those numbers, but if you’re persistent, sometimes you can find a wayward save of the exact work you’re looking for.
[image:
Wayback Machine screenshot:
The very end of eight pages of results.]
Ah, there it is, on page eight. The very last result. The good news is that you can reverse sort any of those categories. So I could have hit the “URL” link at the top of that column and magically made the last result the first.
And of course you can use the Wayback Machine with sites other than Archive of Our Own, I was just using my stuff as an example. Use it anywhere you like. Try
it on the front page of the New York Times! They’ve got captures all the way
back to 1996. When the front page was an honest to god image map. Bless their
hearts. It was a different time.
Heads up–if you try to save something from the AO3, you might need
to do some extra clicking if the work is chaptered or has a certain rating or
both. The Wayback Machine’s not logged in to the archive like you most likely
are, and so it’s only going to get the first chapter of something, not the full
work, and it’s going to get stumped by the “this work could have adult
content—proceed?” page. So you’re going to have to click the “proceed” and
“entire work” buttons yourself, like an animal. Just keep clicking, and make
sure when you stop you’re looking at a saved page that reflects the live page
you just viewed—is it all there, does it have all available chapters—and
then later, when you’re like, “I just read this, how can it be gone???” you’ll
have a copy squirreled away.
The Wayback Machine is an excellent resource, but yes, not at all intuitive to navigate. This is a great intro on finding stuff in the past.
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