Internet Archive
A non-profit digital library whose Wayback Machine holds hundreds of billions of saved snapshots of web pages.
The Internet Archive is the closest thing the web has to a memory. Since 1996 it has been saving copies of web pages, along with books, audio and software, and its Wayback Machine lets anyone look up what a page said on a given date. Journalists use it to check what a company claimed before it quietly edited the page, researchers use it to find sources that have gone offline, and courts have accepted its snapshots as evidence.
It is also under considerable strain. The archive faces cyberattacks, the sheer engineering cost of storing an ever-growing web, and expensive litigation: after publishers won a case over its digital book lending programme, some news organisations began blocking its crawlers, worried that archived copies give AI companies an indirect route to copyrighted material. Every block makes the backup a little less complete.