Dead Simple Backups vs the Wayback Machine

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has saved hundreds of billions of pages, and it has rescued plenty of people who never backed anything up. It is also the reason a lot of small sites have no backup: "it's on archive.org" feels like enough. Usually it is not.

What the Wayback Machine gives you

• Snapshots of pages its crawlers visited, at whatever dates they visited.
• A "save page now" button to capture a single page on demand.
• Free, public access to all of it.

Where it falls short as a backup

Coverage is accidental. Popular pages get crawled often; a small business homepage might be captured a few times a year, and inner pages less. The page you need from the month you need it is frequently missing.

Captures are often incomplete. Images, stylesheets, and fonts are fetched separately, and any that were missed leave the snapshot half-styled. Script-driven layouts, which Squarespace uses, may not render at all.

It is public. Anyone can browse your archived pages. That is fine for most sites and a problem for some. Site owners can also ask for their site to be excluded, in which case there is nothing there at all.

No files. You can view a snapshot; getting the pages and images out as a folder takes third-party tools.

No schedule, no notice. Nothing tells you when a capture happened or failed.

What Dead Simple Backups gives you

A private, complete, dated copy on a schedule: every public page as HTML, a full-page screenshot of each page, and the images, fonts, and styles, on the 1st of every month, with 12 months of history, downloadable as a zip. It needs no password and no plugin, and only you and the people you send the link to can see it.

Use them together

Keep the Wayback Machine as the free fallback for the past you never backed up. Use a real backup for everything from today forward. If you want a single page in the archive on a specific day, the "save page now" button and our free backup are both worth doing.

Q: Can I restore my website from the Wayback Machine?

Sometimes, partly. Text usually survives; images and layout often do not, and inner pages may be missing. It is a last resort, not a plan.

Q: Does the Wayback Machine back up Squarespace sites?

It captures some pages of some Squarespace sites at irregular times, often without complete styling. It is not a reliable backup of a specific site.