There are several reasons why you may want to keep a post or content you saw online for future reference.
One of such reasons is if you are fact-checking claims made by people.
It has been argued that sharing a direct link to a false claim made on social media in your report is giving publicity and traction to the user who shared the misinformation or disinformation.
To solve this conundrum, it’s better you archive the post.
There are different platforms that offer archiving services.
One of such is the Wayback Machine. This is a digital archive of the World Wide Web, founded by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit library based in San Francisco, United States. It is a web archiving tool, which is a repository of stored information. It does this by taking snapshots of web pages.
Archive Today is also another time capsule for web pages. It takes a ‘snapshot’ of a webpage so that it can still be online even if the original page disappears or is deleted.
“It saves a text and a graphical copy of the page for better accuracy and provides a short and reliable link to an unalterable record of any web page,” it noted on its homepage.
To use Archive Today, here are the steps:
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- Visit archive.is through the address bar of your internet browser.
- Copy the URL (website link) of the post you want to archive and paste in the red bar provided for it.
- Then, click Save.
4. Hold on while it saves the page. This will take a few minutes.
5. Once the archiving is completed, it will display a notification page.
How to retrieve an archived post
To retrieve a saved post on the Wayback Machine:
- Visit archive.org through your web browser (Mozilla, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, etc)
- Enter the URL or internet web link of the post to the address bar of the Wayback machine (e.g https://twitter.com/NNPCgroup/)
- Click on browse.
- A calendar will be displayed and the date(s) the post was archived highlighted.
- Click on the highlighted date. It will display the archive post.
- Alternatively, if you do not have the URL you can use keywords to search.
