A website stores infinite data. Sometimes consisting of critical data like passwords as well, they are often considered as a crucial public record, mostly gained by businesses and the government. At times, it becomes necessary to access some bygone data for the sake of research or as a piece of evidence.
Website Archiving is the process of retrieving and storing those historical portions of the World Wide Web so that they can be used in the future for, say, research or learning.
Data can be archived in various ways. The websites are mainly archived in the standard WARC format and are generally accessible by businesses, researchers, the government, and the general public.
As per a recent survey, 58% of small businesses are not prepared for data loss yet! If you are one of those businesses, you better start archiving your data for the future:
Before archiving the data, these are some preliminaries to be satisfied:
- Data documentation must be done very properly so as to ensure transparency and security. Data collection methodology, information of hardware and software, etc. should be present.
- The data which is to be archived must be converted into file formats of those types which are best-suited for long-term. It double-checks the security standards.
- Files and folders must be organized in such a manner that it eases the task of retrieving them when needed. It helps in saving time and reduces the risk of missing data.
- Since you will be archiving super important data, therefore the security of those data should not be compromised. Data should be stored securely in a place safe from mishaps.
- Lastly, since you will be dealing with the data of a lot of individuals, it becomes extremely necessary on moral, ethical, and legal grounds to make those individuals aware of how their data will be used and assuring them that their consent will be taken before using their data.
Now, the various ways to archive web data in the future are:
1) For archiving a web page offline:
If you want to archive only a single web page offline, you need Fireshot installed on your PC. Fireshot is an application that facilitates offline web page archiving. It is pretty easy to use and one of the best choices for offline web page archiving. It takes a screenshot of the web page. Besides, you can store the web page in both PDF and PNG formats. But one of the major disadvantages associated with this is that you cannot store data online.
2) For archiving web pages online:
Wayback Machine is one of the most highly recommended and pivotal tools for archiving web pages online. It also allows you to check the forgone data of any website online, just by entering the URL. But, sadly, it is totally manual and not automated. Apart from this, results produced are not as accurate as screenshots which are taken by applications like Fireshot. Another web archiving tool that can be used as an alternative for Wayback Machine is Stillio.
3) For archiving the entire website:
If you are unsure whether archiving a couple of web pages would work for you or not, it is suggested to archive the whole website. Httrack is a tool that facilitates archiving the entire web page for future uses. Unlike other tools, it does not only take screenshots, but also archives codes and other information, in an HTML format. The only drawback here, however, is that it crashes very often and requires expertise in this field.
Over to you…
Website Data Archiving is important for a lot of reasons. It facilitates the research and collaboration process for the future of many companies. Apart from this, it also helps the general public in accessing certain historical data that might be of great use to them. Here, we cited the various steps and know-hows of website data archiving. If an organization invests in a smart web archiving tool, it is actually preparing itself for the uncertain future.
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