FAQ

Which parts of web page are saved?

  1. Textual content of the web page.
  2. Images.
  3. Content of the frames.
  4. Content and images loaded or generated by Javascript on Web 2.0 sites
  5. Screenshot of 1024x768 pixels.

Which parts of web page are not saved?

  1. Flash and content loaded by flash.
  2. Video and sounds. It has no sense to archive youtube.com unless you want to archive the title of the video and comments. The video itself will not be saved.
  3. PDF
  4. RSS and other XML-pages saved not reliable. Most of them are not saved or saved as blank page.

How long does it take to make a snapshot ?

The same time as to load a page into your browser. Although, saving the pages with heavy scripts or the pages full of Ads may take up to few minutes. There is 5 minutes timeout, if page is not fully loaded in 5 minutes, the saving considered failed. It is not often, but it happens.

It there limit on the page size ?

The stored page with all images must be smaller than 50Mb

What software do you run and how data is stored ?

The archive runs Apache Hadoop and Apache Accumulo. All data is stored on HDFS, textual content is duplicated 3 times among servers in different datacenters and images are duplicated 2 times. All datacenters are in Europe.

How long the page will be stored ?

Virtually forever. We have a lot of free space and alhough the archive grows with time, the storage and bandwidth get cheaper.

May you delete my stored page ?

The pages violated the hoster's rules (cracks, porn, etc) may be deleted. Also, completely empty pages (or pages which has nothing but text like “502 Server Timeout”) may be deleted.

How the archive is funded ?

It is privately funded, there in no complex finance behind it. It may look more or less reliable compared to the startup-style funding or an univercity project, depends on which risks are taken into account. My death can cause interruption of service, but something like new market condition or changing head of a department can not.

Will Ad appers on the archive one day ?

I cannot make a promise that it will not. With the current grouth rate I am able to keep the archive free of ads. Well, I can promise it will have no ads at least till the end of 2014.

How to refer to the saved page ?

Each page has short url http://archive.is/XXXXX, where XXXXX is the unique indentfier of a page. Also, the page can be refered with urls like

The date can be extended further with hours, minutes and seconds:

Year, month, day, hours, minutes and seconds can be separated with dots, dash or colons to increase readability:

It is also possible to refer all snapshots of the given url

All saved pages from the domain

All saved pages from all the subdomains

Can I have an account to manage my bookmarks ?

No. But you can keep bookmarks to archived pages in one of the plenly bookmark managers, like Delicious, Googl Bookmarks, …

Why archive.is does not ovey robots.txt ?

Because it is not free-walking crawler, it saves only one page. Services which request only one page do not obey robots.txt (e.g. screenshot- or pdf-making services, webcitation.org, isup.me, …)

Is IPv6 supported ?

Yes.

Are domains with national characters supported ?

Yes.