The word ‘archive’ is not strange or unknown to common working professionals. You archive your emails, archive Whatsapp chats and even archive any documents stored on your laptop or phone. But what is archiving? – Archiving is a method to separately store your important data in another setup so that in case anything goes wrong, you don’t lose out on your data. Moreover, it also means that everything important is in one place and available for easy access. A new and latest type of archiving is called Web archiving which gained popularity due to the sheer importance of the World Wide Web in the millennial world.
What is Web archiving?
Just like any other archiving process, Web archiving is based on storing online information however all of it is a part of the World Wide Web. Most companies, influencers, Brands or celebrities archive web pages to protect the huge amount of content and information they post online in the form of Blogs, Social media accounts, and websites. It covers everything ranging from HTML pages to JavaScript to Images. Moreover, they tend to save a lot of metadata as well to ensure authenticity and reliable source information for future needs.
Following are some of the types of Web Archiving:
- Client-side web archiving
The most popular type today, this has the advantage of being remote and is possible on a large scale. All you need is an open web with freely available data, and it can be archived using this method. For example – The National Archive uses this technique to archive websites, images, and documents for the UK governments. What happens is that you access data, mostly starting from the SEED or URL link and keep archiving till you reach the boundary of the domain operations. This not only ensures you to save and collect everything as per convenience but also as per choice.
- Transaction-based web archiving
Unlike client based, this works with respect to the server. So, you not only need a website for access but also the respective web server to do the job. It is not very popular due to the mandatory requirement to take permission from the server owner which might be time taking. However, another advantage is that in cases where there is a site which registers multiple external users, data can be saved and only the data viewed or used gets stored. There is no wastage of archiving space and hence works best for internal activities of corporate and institutes. With 75 million servers worldwide in 2014 and since increasing, this can be very difficult to manage.
- Server-side web archiving
Very slightly similar to transaction-based archiving, this one copies and archives data and files directly from a server. So again, you need permission first and then you need to worry about making all taken data easily available as website content after archiving. It becomes difficult to archive every dynamic entry in a server over a long period of time. However, looking at it positively, server data which is vital and would not be accessible via client-side web archiving can be easily used by this method.
A Quick look at the Benefits:
1) Preservation:
The main advantage of Web archiving is long term security of information. You might lose out on content or your posts if your server crashes or your account/ website malfunctions. However, by archiving your web content in another server or by outsourcing contracts to specialized companies, you can ensure that your data is actually never lost.
2) Future records
One never knows what the future holds and as a Brand or individual or legal highly possible. So, with all your online content preserved, it can act as evidence whenever the need arises. Web archiving is authentic, follows legal compliances itself and can be used as a record (similar to the book of accounts of a company) for any future transaction, litigation or other problems.
3) Competition check
Web archiving not only allows you to store what you post it also allows you to keep a track of what your competitors are doing in the online world. Especially any content which automatically deletes within a day on websites or social media and is not accessible later, it can be archived for analysis later. In fact, 66% of organizations rate the process of advanced analytics on archived data as the 3rd most important capability that they consider when choosing an archiving solution.
Hope this article has helped you understand the basics of web archiving. Feel free to ask us if you have any query.
