Have you ever wished you could go back in time and see what a website looked like last year or even last decade? Most of us probably don't think about that on a regular basis, but there have been two times when I wanted to rewind the clock and see an older site.
The first time was when I switched hosting providers for my business webpage. I cancelled my service with one provider before I set up my site with the other. I planned to design a new page with my new provider, but I later wished I could recover the text from the front page of my site.
The second incident involved a dispute over terms of service. I purchased something from a company, and they later tried to claim that I had agreed to terms I had not agreed to. Since I had not saved a copy of the terms of service from the time of purchase (and they had changed since), it seemed that I had no way to prove that their terms had changed.
Fortunately, there is a way to rewind the clock on websites, and it worked perfectly in both of the situations above. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine contains a database of 435 billion pages throughout the internet's history. I was able to easily recover the text off of my home page (and see the pages of other companies that had occupied my domain name), and I was able to show that the terms of service that were in effect both before and after the date of my purchase did not contain the disputed sentence (thus, qualifying me for a refund).
If you need to view a past version of a website or you are just feeling nostalgic, head on over to the Wayback Machine and see what you can find.
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