If you love a website, back it up

Curated from Lobsters

Web archives are often treated as a luxury for historians, not a necessity for engineers. This piece argues that if you rely on a specific website for operational context, documentation, or community knowledge, you should treat it as a critical dependency. When a site goes down or changes its structure, your team loses access to that institutional memory. Instead of passively hoping the content remains available, you should proactively capture it. This is a reminder that digital preservation is an operational task, not just a cultural one. The takeaway is simple: if a website is part of your workflow, set up a regular archive job using tools like ArchiveBox or the Wayback Machine’s save page function. Do not assume that public internet content will remain accessible in the same form for long.

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