Practical articles for anyone who has to show what a web page said, and when: lawyers, compliance teams, researchers and journalists. How pages disappear, what makes a capture hold up, and how to keep one.
Asked what your terms said on the day a customer signed up, the live page is the wrong answer. What to record, how long to keep it, and how to build a version history you can produce.
8 min readA page you capture daily can still change twice between captures. How to choose a capture frequency from what a missed version would cost, with starting intervals for terms, prices and claims.
8 min readA hash shows that a file has not changed since it was hashed. It does not show the file is genuine, or when it was made. What a SHA-256 hash proves, what it can't, and what to pair it with.
7 min readWARC is the format libraries and web archives use to store captured pages. What is inside one, how to open and check it with free tools, and when you need one instead of a PDF.
8 min readA timestamp is only worth something if someone can check it. What an RFC 3161 token proves, how to read one, and the OpenSSL commands that verify it against the file, step by step.
9 min readThe Wayback Machine is often the only record of what a site used to say. Courts treat it with more caution than many people expect. What a Wayback capture shows, where it falls short, and when you need your own copy.
6 min readA screenshot shows what a page looked like, but not where it came from, when, or that nobody touched it since. What a capture needs to record to hold up when someone disputes it, and a checklist for doing it properly.
8 min readA quarter of the web pages that existed between 2013 and 2023 are gone, and half the links in US Supreme Court opinions no longer show what they cited. The research on link rot and content drift, and what it means for anything you cite.
6 min readStart free with 100 MB of storage. No card required.