Wayback, archive.today and Google Cache for site recovery

The Wayback Machine handles 80% of recovery jobs. The other 20% is when Wayback didn't help and you still need the site. That's where the side options come in.

Wayback Machine — primary

• Best depth — captures going back 25+ years
• Calendar view that shows snapshot frequency
• You can save a page right now if the site is still up
• Weak spot: no pages behind login, and respects robots.txt Disallow

archive.today (also archive.ph)

• Saves on user request — exact pixel-perfect snapshot of what the browser saw
• Ignores robots.txt — sometimes has what Wayback won't show
• Especially useful for articles readers have manually archived
• Limitation: only pages someone explicitly saved

Google Cache

• Freshest version — often only weeks old
• Useful when the site went down recently and Google hasn't dropped it from the index yet
• Downside: Google removes pages from cache 2-4 weeks after the original is gone
• In 2024 Google started winding down public cache access — the cache:URL query still works most of the time

Bing Cache + Yandex

• Bing keeps its cache longer than Google
• Yandex "saved copy" in search results — often fresher than Wayback for Russian-language sites

Recovery strategy

Don't pick one source — work through all of them in order:

1. Wayback Machine — the bulk of the pages
2. Google Cache — freshest versions of homepage and priority pages
3. archive.today — pages missing from Wayback, picked off one by one
4. Yandex/Bing — fill remaining gaps for Russian-language content

Real coverage usually comes from combining 2-3 sources, not relying on one.