What Is Digital Preservation and Why It Matters for the Open Web

Digital preservation is the work of keeping digital material, such as web pages, documents, photos, software and data, available and usable for the long term. It sounds like a job for librarians, but it affects anyone who has clicked a link to find the page gone.

Why the web disappears

• Sites shut down when companies close, owners stop paying or projects end.
• Pages move or get deleted in redesigns.
• Content changes without any record of what it said before.
• Formats age: files saved in old software or on old media can become unreadable.

A 2024 Pew Research Center study found that 38% of web pages that existed in 2013 were no longer available a decade later. See when a website disappears.

Why it matters

• History: much of public life since the 1990s happened online.
• Accountability: archived pages show what companies and governments said and when.
• Research and journalism: citations that break make work impossible to check. See how researchers use web archives.
• Personal memories: photos, blogs and messages on services that may not last.

Who preserves the web

• The Internet Archive runs the Wayback Machine, the largest public web archive. Its outage after a cyberattack in October 2024 showed the risk of relying on one organization.
• National libraries such as the Library of Congress and the British Library archive websites from their countries.
• Perma.cc, run by Harvard's law library, makes permanent copies of pages cited in courts and journals.
• Volunteers such as Archive Team rush to save sites that announce they're closing.

See web archiving tools beyond the Wayback Machine.

How you can help

1. Save pages you cite or rely on to the Wayback Machine. See how Save Page Now works.
2. Back up your own content: export blogs, photos and social media regularly. Keep three copies on two kinds of storage, one off-site.
3. Use open formats such as PDF, plain text, JPEG and CSV for things you want to keep.
4. Keep your own site's old URLs working with redirects when you redesign.

Check and save from your browser

Wayback Quick Access shows whether the page you're on has archived copies, opens the latest snapshot or the full list of captures, and saves the page to the archive with one click.