I’m trying to archive the Squarespace site www.FirstWeekFlipPhone.com, as we’re moving to a minimalist Carrd site instead. Thought I’d share my attempts.

Option 0: Internet Archive

You can’t manually request your site is added. The Archive Team maintains the ArchiveBot, an IRC bot where you can request to crawl websites. Here’s my effort: https://web.archive.org/web/https://www.firstweekflipphone.com. That general url will automatically show the latest version. It’s a little patchy: Take the Stories page, a Squarespace Index page.

Some Squarespace magic redirects that to a hash bang lik to make the index page work www.firstweekflipphone.com/stories Unfortunately, the archive just follows the link itself, which renders the index image annoyingly large:

Moreover, much of the content is not handled very well: e.g. the YouTube embed doesn’t always load natively, or sometimes even display.

Other Options

According to 7 Wayback Machine Alternatives.

1. Archive.fo: https://archive.fo/t0Sf1

+ No login needed

- Only 1 page at a time

2. Perma.cc: https://perma.cc/N66J-ULPU

+ More modern interface

- Only 1 page at a time

3. Pagefreezer

+ Whole websites

- B2B product

4. Actiance

see above

5. Stillio: 14 day free trial https://app.stillio.com/url/e7fcb205-be00-4f53-bdf4-060d5184dcf2

Remember to set Sharing on to allow links to work publicly^

+ Modern web interface

- B2B: min. $29/mo

- Screenshot focussed

6. UK Web Archive

- Supposedly for .uk domains only. Have appealed based on my UK citizenry for a .com: will update outcome.

7. Memento Time Travel: https://timetravel.mementoweb.org/list/20200928095012/http://www.firstweekflipphone.com

More like an aggregator tool showing archives from Wayback Machine and beyond. - Can’t directly archive

Conclusion

For a personal project, seems that Wayback Machine is still the best. However it is - Painfully slow for users to load - Doesn’t reliably capture content But it is: + free

Does anyone know of any low cost alternatives which more reliably capture content: let me know by WebMentioning this post or responding on Micro.Blog (or comment on a social syndication if you must!).

w4rner