There’s a big difference between having backups of your web server and having archives of your website. Do you know the difference?
What is a backup? If you have a backup of your web server it means you keep copies of all the necessary files to reproduce your website. The necessary files are normally things like HTML, CSS, images, template structure files, etc. What you may not know, however, is that you also have to keep backups of your databases and technologies used to produce your website. In order to reproduce your website from a backup you have to re-instate, or re-build your website from the backed up versions of the files.
What is a web archive? A web archive of your website is an archived version of each of the pages in your website. These archived versions have already been rendered and processed by the browser when they are stored, so they are independent of any databases or outside technology. In other words, you will always be able to re-play these pages by themselves, without any connections to your live website. With IterasiArchives all of your archived webpages are easy to browse and search across in the user interface.
Both of these options can reproduce your website later on for forensic, e-discovery, or heritage purposes, but a web archive will do so quicker, easier, and probably more affordably. Here are some of the challenges you’ll face with maintaining backups that you won’t face with using Iterasi’s web archiving technology:
- You must continually make backups of your website, and store them all yourself. This is a manual process and can be very expensive depending on the size of your website.
- You must keep copies of any databases as well as template files, html, etc., because often times databases are driving the content of the site. So if you only re-instate the template files, all of the database content will remain the same, hence not providing a valid reproduction of the webpage.
- Often times technology changes and old technology requires old systems to run, especially if you are reproducing a website from several years ago. It’s very rare to have old systems still installed purely for the purposes of re-creating old websites.
- Backups can be hard to restore without the original personnel who created the site. Often times these people no longer work for the company and are inaccessible.
If you must reproduce an old website for litigation or other reasons, it may be impossible for you to do so for these reasons. On the other hand, if you had an archived version of the website using IterasiArchives, you would always have a copy of the entire website available for you to browse, search, and share.
People aren’t used to being able to create archives of their websites, but now it’s possible with IterasiArchives!
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Comic from Case In Point
