Re:The value of not getting to the point (2015)
by charcircuit on Friday October 09, 2026 @01:25PM
(#50023826)
>e.g. IIRC, they make silent changes to pages
There is one documented case of this and it was in response to harassment. My usage of archival doesn't involve me harassing the person who is graciously offering that service to me so it is outside of my threat model. This is actually a case of letting perfect be the enemy of good. I frequently archive posts where the owner may want them to be removed so what archive.org allows is against my threat model against the archive. They are not the same.
>they reserve the right to just disappear without a trace tomorrow
I already gave you an example of how they made the archive of 4chan disappear out of the blue with no warning. Archive.org is no better in this respect of archives going away with no warning.
Archive.org also can randomly lock your account and delete all of the stuff you archived with no way to appeal. An organization that actually cared about preserving things wouldn't be so haphazard with the collateral damage of deleting everything from users. The site cannot be trusted for long term preservation of data.
Ultimately everything is temporary so if you really care about backing something up you should do it yourself. I believe both these sites do give you a download option to save the pages locally.
There is one documented case of this and it was in response to harassment. My usage of archival doesn't involve me harassing the person who is graciously offering that service to me so it is outside of my threat model. This is actually a case of letting perfect be the enemy of good. I frequently archive posts where the owner may want them to be removed so what archive.org allows is against my threat model against the archive. They are not the same.
>they reserve the right to just disappear without a trace tomorrow
I already gave you an example of how they made the archive of 4chan disappear out of the blue with no warning. Archive.org is no better in this respect of archives going away with no warning.
Archive.org also can randomly lock your account and delete all of the stuff you archived with no way to appeal. An organization that actually cared about preserving things wouldn't be so haphazard with the collateral damage of deleting everything from users. The site cannot be trusted for long term preservation of data.
Ultimately everything is temporary so if you really care about backing something up you should do it yourself. I believe both these sites do give you a download option to save the pages locally.