Archiving websites and social media
Websites and social-media accounts are rich sources of information that you can save for the future. However, these sources are ephemeral and change rapidly. This guide offers some steps for preserving this type of content as part of your digital archive.
Websites
The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web. Here, you can browse archived versions of web pages that have been captured over the years. For example, see the captures of Google from 1999 and 2021 below:
Anyone can capture a copy of their webpage on the Wayback Machine. This is a good way to ensure you have a record of your site over time. To submit your site, paste the URL into the “Save Page Now” area.
If you want to save your web pages without submitting them to the internet archive, you can right-click on any web page and select “save as” to save it as an individual file. Once the file is saved, you can duplicate it and save it to your archive as you would your images.
Social media
Most major social-media platforms enable you to download an archive of your account:
Once you have downloaded your files, you can duplicate them and save them to your archive.
Further resources
Internet Archive, Save Pages in the Wayback Machine
Social Control 2019 Zine, A Guide to Owning your Social Media Content