What can be recovered from the Web Archive?

Published: 2020-12-29

Sometimes our users ask why the website was not fully restored? Why the website doesn't it work the way I would like it to? There are several answers to this, and the very first one is that the website is being restored from the web archive, and therefore you can only restore what is and nothing more.

The Wayback Machine only saves the outer part of the website and cannot save the inner structure, admin panel, database, and so on. If the website was previously dynamic, then after restoring from the archive it will be static. Contact forms, comment boxes, and online purchases elements will not work. With a few exceptions - if it's all implemented in Java scripts that were saved by the Web Archive. You need to be more careful with them, because it often happens that they transmit or take some data from third-party domains, and if before, for example, there was a visiter counter script , now, after the domain was rebuilt, there can be everything including malvare.

After restoring the website, we recommend to check with our CMS all external links in the Java scripts code using the http: // and https: // templates and figure out what they do.

Another example of why restored website is not working as expected is not loaded CSS styles. On some websites, styles may be on a different domain. Our spider script will processes only links from one domain and does not follow external links. This issue can be easily verified by looking in the site code for the URL where the site styles are located. And if they look like this - https://another_domain.com/styles/main.css,  it is better to download CSS styles from the Web Archive and manually upload them to the site using our CMS.

And finally, the third and most common case of incorrect operation of the restored site is incorrectly set recovery time intervals. The date the site was archived on archive.org does not mean that the entire site, from start to finish, was archived at that time. In fact, all files, styles, scripts, images were saved at different times. Too narrow period of time setted in our system, as a rule, leads to the fact that a significant part of the website will be not restored. Sometimes it is not easy to choose right timestamp, but to help you, we have an article on how to do it - https://archivarix.com/en/blog/3-how-does-it-works-archiveorg/

The use of article materials is allowed only if the link to the source is posted: https://archivarix.com/en/blog/what-can-be-recovered/

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Latest news:
2020.11.03
The new version of CMS has become more convenient and understandable for webmasters from around the world.

- Full localization of Archivarix CMS into 13 languages (English, Spanish, Italian, German, French, Portuguese, Polish, Turkish, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian).
- Export all current site data to a zip archive to save a backup or transfer to another site.
- Show and remove broken zip archives in import tools.
- PHP version check during installation.
- Information for installing CMS on a server with NGINX + PHP-FPM.
- In the search, when the expert mode is on, the date/time of the page and a link to its copy in the WebArchive are displayed.
- Improvements to the user interface.
- Code optimization.

If you are a native speaker of a language into which our CMS has not yet been translated, then we invite you to make our product even better. Via Crowdin service you can apply and become our official translator into new languages.
2020.10.06
A new Archivarix CMS version.
- CLI support to deploy websites right from a command line, imports, settings, stats, history purge and system update.
- Support for password_hash() encrypted passwords that can be used in CLI.
- Expert mode to enable an additional debug information, experimental tools and direct links to WebArchive saved snapshots.
- Tools for broken internal images and links can now return a list of all missing urls instead of deleting.
- Import tool shows corrupted/incomplete zip files that can be removed.
- Improved cookie support to catch up with requirements of modern browsers.
- A setting to select default editor to HTML pages (visual editor or code).
- Changes tab showing text differences is off by default, can be turned on in settings.
- You can roll back to a specific change in the Changes tab.
- Fixed XML sitemap url for websites that are built with a www subdomain.
- Fixed removal temporary files that were created during an installation/import process.
- Faster history purge.
- Femoved unused localization phrases.
- Language switch on the login screen.
- Updated external packages to their most recent versions.
- Optimized memory usage for calculating text differences in the Changes tab.
- Improved support for old versions of php-dom extension.
- An experimental tool to fix file sizes in the database in case you edited files directly on a server.
- An experimental and very raw flat-structure export tool.
- An experimental public key support for the future API features.
2020.06.08
The first June update of Archivarix CMS with new, convenient features.
- Fixed: History section did not work when there was no zip extension enabled in php.
- New History tab with details of changes when editing text files.
- .htaccess edit tool.
- Ability to clean up backups to the desired rollback point.
- "Missing URLs" section removed from Tools as it is accessible from the dashboard.
- Monitoring and showing free disk space in the dashboard.
- Improved check of the required PHP extensions on startup and initial installation.
- Minor cosmetic changes.
- All external tools updated to latest versions.
2020.05.21
An update that web studios and those using outsourcing will appreciate.
- Separate password for safe mode.
- Extended safe mode. Now you can create custom rules and files, but without executable code.
- Reinstalling the site from the CMS without having to manually delete anything from the server.
- Ability to sort custom rules.
- Improved Search & Replace for very large sites.
- Additional settings for the "Viewport meta tag" tool.
- Support for IDN domains on hosting with the old version of ICU.
- In the initial installation with a password, the ability to log out is added.
- If .htaccess is detected during integration with WP, then the Archivarix rules will be added to its beginning.
- When downloading sites by serial number, CDN is used to increase speed.
- Other minor improvements and fixes.
2020.05.12
Our Archivarix CMS is developing by leaps and bounds. The new update, in which the following appeared:
- New dashboard for viewing statistics, server settings and system updates.
- Ability to create templates and conveniently add new pages to the site.
- Integration with Wordpress and Joomla in one click.
- Now in Search & Replace, additional filtering is done in the form of a constructor, where you can add any number of rules.
- Now you can filter the results by domain/subdomains, date-time, file size.
- A new tool to reset the cache in Cloudlfare or enable / disable Dev Mode.
- A new tool for removing versioning in urls, for example, "?ver=1.2.3" in css or js. Allows you to repair even those pages that looked crooked in the WebArchive due to the lack of styles with different versions.
- The robots.txt tool has the ability to immediately enable and add a Sitemap map.
- Automatic and manual creation of rollback points for changes.
- Import can import templates.
- Saving/Importing settings of the loader contains the created custom files.
- For all actions that can last longer than a timeout, a progress bar is displayed.
- A tool to add a viewport meta tag to all pages of a site.
- Tools for removing broken links and images have the ability to account for files on the server.
- A new tool to fix incorrect urlencode links in html code. Rarely, but may come in handy.
- Improved missing urls tool. Together with the new loader, now counts calls to non-existent URLs.
- Regex Tips in Search & Replace.
- Improved checking for missing php extensions.
- Updated all used js tools to the latest versions.

This and many other cosmetic improvements and speed optimizations.