Using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to find copies of Instagram deleted pages

 Using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to find copies of Instagram deleted pages

Using the web Archive’s Wayback Machine to seek out copies of deleted pages

web archive instagram

Ever clicked on a link and located that the page doesn’t exist? This post is for you.

1. Manage your expectations

2. Check program caches for recent deleted pages

3. Try the web Archive’s Wayback Machine for much older pages

4. Other relevant posts on this blog

5. Troubleshooting and alternative options

1. Manage your expectations

Although there are several tools to uncover deleted pages there’s no guarantee that you’ll find the page you’re trying to find . Not all websites are captured or sometimes the actual page you would like hasn’t been saved. Best to always approach these searches as a pleasing surprise if you discover anything.

2. Check program caches for recently deleted pages

Search engines index websites by crawling through all their links, they often keep a cached copy of the page. once you type during a search term and press enter you’re shown an inventory of possible hits and if you click on the most link you’ll go straight to the page. On Google and Bing (and I’m sure many other program s) this small little arrow will show you a replica that the search engine has saved in its cache. No arrow = no available cache.

web archive instagram

Cached pages are continually overwritten and updated therefore the cache of a page deleted today may disappear during a few days so this feature only works for recently deleted pages (sometimes it works for tweets too, try checking out the person’s profile and see if anything shows up.

If you discover what you’re trying to find you would possibly wish to save a replica of the webpage as a file (eg in Firefox this is often File / Save Page As…) or reserve it as a screenshot.

3. Try the web Archive’s Wayback Machine for much older pages

If you don’t find a replica employing a program then try the Wayback Machine. This tool captures all kinds of websites automatically but people also can ask it to save lots of a replica of an internet site (from now onwards) if it’s not currently there.

Go to https://archive.org/

and type within the address of the web site (homepage) or particular link (blog post etc) that you’re curious about , then press enter on your keyboard or click anywhere outside the text box.

Either you’ll see a page telling you nothing’s been saved (see 5. Troubleshooting and alternative options) or you’ll see something like this.

This tells me that pages from this very blog are saved 23 times in three and a half years and that i can use the year tabs at the highest to scroll back. Each black bar represents a month, its length indicates the amount of copies made. Here’s 2016 – two copies saved – one on October 17th (highlighted) and another on 14 November.

To access the saved copy hover over the the blue dot on the date it had been collected and a flash later the small crop up will show with a link to at least one or more snapshots taken. The timestamp is that the link to a replica of the location / page taken at that point thereon date. Click to go to , the instance for this website is below – you'll see that the numbers within the link relate to the year, month, day and time

There’s a video showing the complete process below (includes a small delay because the archived page takes longer to open).

4. Other relevant posts on this blog

“Forensic” Twitter – getting evidence to be used in court etc (18 July 2015) – many advice on finding and capturing information with attention on Twitter

Google cache (& other search engines): finding deleted pages or seeing your words on the page in colour (12 March 2016) – a kind of precursor to the present page

Taking a screenshot (16 October 2016) – the way to capture what’s on your screen, on several platforms

Occasional workaround for reading US websites which are skittish about EU visitors, GDPR and cookies (28 July 2018) – a special kind of missing page. US news sites aren’t always available within the UK / EU, sometimes you'll creep up on them

A slightly forensic Twitter example – during which a key tweet is now unavailable (3 March 2019) – finding evidence

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