Alternatives to the Wayback Machine
By Peekivo
Last reviewed
The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is not the only public web archive. National archives such as Arquivo.pt keep their own copies, Perma.cc makes lasting copies for citations, and Common Crawl publishes raw crawl data. An archive shows what a page looked like on the dates it was captured; it cannot tell you when a page changes.
Web archives compared
| What it keeps | Who starts a capture | How you find a copy | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wayback Machine (Internet Archive) | Copies of public pages from automated crawls and from Save Page Now requests | The archive's crawlers, or anyone using Save Page Now | Enter a web address and choose Browse History |
| Arquivo.pt | Files archived from the web since 1996, kept for research | Not stated on its home page | Search pages and images on its website |
| UK Web Archive | UK websites; its site says it is continuing to archive them | The archive; its site says it can add new websites to its acquisition process | Currently unavailable, after a cyber-attack on the British Library |
| Perma.cc | A lasting copy of a page you want to cite, behind a new Perma.cc link | A user who enters the web address | Through the Perma.cc link made for that copy |
| Common Crawl | Raw page data, metadata and text extracts collected since 2008 | Common Crawl's own regular crawls | A URL index, or analysis and downloads of the data |
Wayback Machine
The Internet Archive's help pages say a site's robots.txt can prevent crawling, and that pages which are password-protected or otherwise inaccessible to its automated systems are not archived. They also say there is a lag of 3 to 10 hours between a crawl and the copy appearing in the Wayback Machine.
Arquivo.pt
Arquivo.pt describes itself as the Portuguese web archive: a research infrastructure for searching and accessing files archived from the web since 1996, with the preservation of web information for research as its main objective.
UK Web Archive
On 1 October 2026 the UK Web Archive's website said the archive was currently unavailable because the British Library was still experiencing disruption after a cyber-attack, and that it was continuing to archive UK websites.
Perma.cc
Perma.cc is developed and maintained by the Harvard Law School Library with university law libraries and other organisations, for anyone who needs to cite the web with links that do not break. You enter a web address, Perma.cc downloads the page and gives back a new link. Academic institutions and courts can use it for free; other organisations and individuals pay by subscription or per link.
Common Crawl
Common Crawl's corpus holds petabytes of web data collected regularly since 2008. It is built for analysis: you search it through a URL index, run jobs against it or download it, whole or in part. Access to the copy hosted by Amazon is free.
Search engine caches
Google's cached copies are no longer an option. Google Search Central records that the cache: search operator no longer works and that the cached link feature is no longer available in Google Search results.
How to save a page yourself
- Wayback Machine: on archive.org/web, use Save Page Now to save a specific page one time.
- Perma.cc: enter the web address to get a lasting copy behind a Perma.cc link, if you have access through your institution or a subscription.
- Your own copy: your browser's save or print-to-PDF command keeps a copy on your computer. It records what you saw, but nobody else can check it against the live page.
Archive or watch?
An archive captures pages on its own schedule or when someone asks. It is the place to look for what a page said in the past, but it will not tell you when the page changes, and it may have no copy from the day that mattered. A change monitor does the opposite: from the day you start it, it reads the page on a schedule, keeps dated copies of the part you care about and tells you when it changes.
What Peekivo is and is not built to do here
- Peekivo is not a web archive and does not offer copies of pages from before you started watching them.
- Once you approve a watch, each alert shows the watched part of the page before and after the change.
- Peekivo is in early access. Today you can join the waitlist; there is no public sign-up yet.
Questions
Is there another version of the Wayback Machine?
There is no second Wayback Machine, but there are other archives. National archives such as Arquivo.pt keep their own copies, Perma.cc makes lasting copies for citations, and Common Crawl publishes crawl data for analysis.
Can an archive tell me when a page changes?
No. An archive shows the copies it captured, on its own schedule. To hear about a change when it happens, use a change monitor or the site's own feed or email alerts.
Related
Sources
- Internet Archive Help Center: Using the Wayback Machine, fetched
- Arquivo.pt, fetched
- UK Web Archive: Frequently Asked Questions, fetched
- Perma.cc: About, fetched
- Common Crawl: Overview, fetched
- Google Search Central: Latest Google Search documentation updates, fetched
Want to be told when a page changes?
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