I Posted About the Wayback Machine a Few Times – November 18, 2020

Standard Disclaimers:

I am not an attorney and any comments I post are not intended, nor should they be construed, as legal advice. If you need legal advice, please consult a legal expert who is familiar with the area of legal expertise you need.

It’s been a while since I covered the Wayback Machine – Wayback Machine Back-up. It’s a great way to save stuff from your blog. They honor if a site doesn’t want stuff saved to the Wayback Machine. The link above is from January 2019. I checked on it today and noticed it has a lot more pages saved from almost 2 years ago. Back then it had 347 billion pages saved. Now it has 486 billion pages saved. This includes free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. When I originally posted the link above, only 3 of my pages were saved; today it has 24 saved pages: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://upsdownsfamilyhistory.wordpress.com/. It’s a handy tool to use for your blog. Sometimes when I am doing a blog post, Wikipedia only has the Wayback Machine link to the original website. The website may have changed, or the website owner didn’t pay the fee to retain the website address.

Not an issue with those using the free WordPress like me. Since WordPress is part of my URL, that won’t change so it will always be available. If I go for a paid plan and choose a domain name, the domain name URL will remain mine as long as I keep paying the fee to keep it active. Once I stop paying the fee, then I have a brief window to pay the fee before it lapses. In which case, I would still keep the old WordPress URL.

Anyone can save stuff to the Wayback Machine. What you have to watch out for is copyright issues. Many of the Sherlock Holmes books Sherlock Holmes and Copyright are in the public domain, but there are about a handful of books that are still covered by copyright. Looks like a couple of books are now in the public domain from the link as they went in the public domain on January 1, 2020. Likewise, many of the movies are still covered by copyright if they include things that weren’t in the public domain books.