Have you ever clicked on a link only to land on an empty webpage with the message "Error 404" or "404 Not Found?" If so, you're not alone. There are several reasons this can happen — the simplest being a misspelled URL. But increasingly, the cause is that the page has been deleted or moved, sometimes intentionally.

That's why DW Fact check has put together a guide to help you find deleted or altered content. We also explore the most popular tools for digital archiving, which are useful not only for recovering lost content, but also for preserving anything you find online that might be important later.

As online fact checking practices hve grown in importance, tools for archiving digital content have become essential. They allow users to take 'snapshots' of websites or social media posts, capturing how they looked at a specific moment in time, and ensuring they remain accessible — even if the original content disappears.

Internet content changes constantly — pages vanish, links break, and information gets edited or removed. According to a study by the Pew Research Center , 38% of the webpages from 2013 are no longer available.

Archiving is more than a technical solution — it's a tool for accountability, transparency, and preserving history. Real-world cases illustrate why archiving is so crucial.

In January 2025, the White House shut down its Spanish-language page. The Library of US Congress  removed certain parts of the US Constitutionfrom its online archive.

In September 2022, Iran restricted internet access in parts of Tehran and Kurdistan, blocking Instagram and WhatsApp during protests following the death of a Kurdish woman in police custody.

And in China, a once-extensive internet archive run by Peking University, which allowed searches of more than 2.5 billion historical Chinese web pages, is no longer accessible.

Web archives have been important in providing evidence in court cases and public discussions. Images like screenshots can easily be manipulated. "Web archives, on the other hand, record the entire contents of a web page, including its source HTML and embedded images, stylesheets, or JavaScript source," Michele Weigle, professor of computer science at Old Dominion University wrote in her article On the Importance of Web Archiving.

DW Fact check has put together a list of four go-to tools for web archiving.

The Wayback Machine 

One of the most widely used free archiving tools is the Wayback Machine launched in 2001 by the non-profit Internet Archive. Its mission is to "preserve those [digital] artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars."  

Their first internet crawls began in 1996,to address broken links (404 errors). A crawl is an automated process of collecting and copying webpages — creating 'snapshots' of them. Users can search by URL or keywords to view how a site looked on specific dates.

Pros: Comprehensive, free, and widely used.
Cons: Occasionally inaccessible due to hacking, keyword searches can be tricky.

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is the oldest and biggest public web archive, but it's not the only one. Many countries and national libraries have their own web archives, too. 

Archive.today 

Launched in 2012,Archive.today is a user-driven tool that saves web pages without active elements or scripts. It is great for archiving dynamic content like social media posts. It saves functional links. And it is not as large as the Wayback Machine, but more personal and responsive.

Pros: Fast, easy, and free.
Cons: Relies on user initiative, smaller archive.

Perma.cc

Developed by the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Universityin 2013, Perma.cc combats link rot as this is "a big problem, especially for academic scholarship and judicial opinions, which depend heavily on citations to stable sources that readers can access."

Archived through Perma.cc, the website stays interactive, and links stay clickable. It is, however, only free for organizations affiliated with academic institutions and courts. Others will need to pay a monthly subscription.  

Pros: Reliable for scholarly use.
Cons: Limited free access.

Ghostarchive 

Launched in 2021, Ghostarchivespecializes in archiving videos and dynamic content, which is often used on social media — areas where other tools often struggle. It has a high success rate with video content, but is not always reliable. 

Pros: High success rate with video content.
Cons: Not 100% reliable.

A Chrome extension called Web Archivesalso bundles several archiving tools, reflecting the growing need to preserve online content as it continues to expand.  

Why does archiving matter? 

Archiving helps hold public figures accountable and track how their statements evolve over time.

"We can share at least the digital archive of our reality," says Henk van Ess, expert in online research and open-source intelligence. "If  politicians say something many, many years ago and they change their opinion, it's super important to find out what they actually said. So, it's basically the best way of sharing reality together again," he explains.

As Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, put it in an interviewwith the Financial Times: "It’s not about trying to archive the stuff that’s true, but archiving the conversation."

When archiving falls short 

Not all pages are archived equally, and to archive all online content would be impossible. Popular sites are regularly scraped, while smaller ones are archived more sporadically. Tools like Archive.today depend on users to initiate the archiving process.

"Every hour, there's so much material produced on the web that it's technically impossible to copy and paste it," says Van Ess.  Additionally, some sites block archiving tools using settings like robots.txt., and others may not be linked from anywhere, making them invisible to crawlers. Sometimes, technical issues like connection errors or data limits can prevent successful archiving.

"One of the biggest challenges for web archiving is capturing today’s dynamic webpages at scale," says Weigle.

Van Ess also warns that legal pressures may increasingly hinder archiving: "We live in a world, at least in Western democracy, that is 'lawyered up'. If you have criticism about what has been argued, it is nowadays quite easy to remove it because of the legal ramifications."

The most important takeaway is that the saying, "The internet never forgets!" is often true and we can use it to our advantage, and find older versions of websites, or even deleted websites, in the archives of the net.

Edited by: Rachel Baig