Download this tutorial as a pdf file here.

The Internet Archive has a “Save page now” function that is highly convenient for two main purposes:

– It provides a way to instantly save content that you have found, and

– It provides you with a stable reference to said content.

If one signs up for a free Internet Archive account, more functions will become available in addition to adding the page to The Internet Archive, including options to save a copy in a personal archive, save a screenshot the page, get an email notification when a save is completed, and saving the other pages found in outlinks from your starting page. The last option cannot be used for a full crawl of a website, but may be handy for storing more relevant pages in one go.

An archived copy of a webpage is safer to use as a reference in scientific articles or dissertations than the original page URL, because the archived copy is much less likely to disappear later than the “live” webpage.

The service has two limitations; it will not capture pages that do now allow crawling, and The Internet Archive respects such policies retroactively; wherefore a successfully saved page may still become unavailable.

For these reasons it is still recommended to create local copies of the content you wish to preserve, but the “Save page now” feature can help you to capture content before it disappears, and in most cases will be an improvement over referencing an original URL.

Service provider: https://archive.org/web/