The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine

Frustrated by receiving an error message when clicking on a link to a document or a website? Sometimes documents have been taken down from websites and website URLs “break.” But, there is a tool you can try that may help you recover the past. The Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization that provides free access to various digital materials. One of the most useful of the Internet Archive’s collections is its massive archive of websites—including old websites.

The Internet Archive hosts the Wayback Machine , which periodically crawls the World Wide Web and preserves webpages in dynamic form. The Wayback Machine does this by preserving sites’ underlying data like images and source code. Users can view older versions of websites and even visit websites that have been taken down.  

The Internet Archive has been archiving websites since 1996, and there are currently more than 343 billion web pages preserved with varying degrees of snapshot frequencies. Users can type in their URL of interest into the main search bar and will be directed to a page displaying the various points in time the URL was saved by the Wayback Machine.

Need to find a fiscal note authored by the North Carolina Fiscal Research Division from 2010 that you cannot seem to find elsewhere? Try the Internet Archive’s saved versions of the state government website.

We also invite you to take a glimpse into our own history and browse older versions of the UNC Kathrine R. Everett Law Library website here.