Why we support the Internet Archive
The web forgets. Pages are edited, moved and deleted every day, and a link that worked last year often leads nowhere today. The Internet Archive, a non-profit library founded to give "universal access to all knowledge", has been keeping copies of the web since 1996, and its Wayback Machine lets anyone see a page as it once was. Noiz supports it because a public record that nobody can quietly rewrite is part of what keeps the internet free. This piece explains what the Archive does, why it matters, and how any website owner can help.
What the Internet Archive is
The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library, registered as a charity in the United States. It offers free access to researchers, historians, students, people with print disabilities and the general public. In its own figures, as at October 2026, it holds:
| Collection | Size |
|---|---|
| Web pages | More than 1 trillion |
| Books and texts | 56 million |
| Audio recordings | 13 million, including 280,000 live concerts |
| Videos | 15 million, including 3.3 million television news programmes |
| Images | 5.3 million |
| Software programs | 1.3 million |
A single copy of the collection takes more than 200 petabytes, and the Archive keeps at least two copies of everything. It works with more than 1,400 libraries and other partners, and is funded by donations, grants and the archiving and digitisation services it provides.
Why it matters
A record nobody can quietly edit
When a statement, a policy or a price list disappears from a website, the Wayback Machine often still has it, with the date it was captured. Journalists, courts, researchers and ordinary people use it to check what was said and when. A public record that the original author cannot silently rewrite is a strong defence of the truth.
Knowledge that outlives its publisher
Companies close, projects end and domains lapse. Software manuals, research and whole communities' histories survive on the Archive long after the sites that held them are gone.
A library that respects its readers
The Archive says it avoids keeping its readers' IP addresses, and it serves its site over encrypted connections. A library that does not track what you read fits the values Noiz holds: privacy first, and power over information in the hands of the people who use it.
How you can help
Any website owner, and any reader, can help the Archive keep more of the web:
- Let it crawl your site. Sites can be missed if they are password protected, unlinked or blocked by robots.txt. The Archive's own guidance is that a site's robots.txt and robots meta tags should not tell crawlers to stay away if the owner wants it archived. Check yours.
- Save important pages yourself. Save Page Now captures a single page, with its images and styles, and gives it a permanent address. The Archive says it does not keep your IP address when you do.
- Install the browser extension, available for the major browsers and as mobile apps, to save or look up pages as you browse.
- Donate. The Archive takes one-time or monthly gifts on its donate page, and several cryptocurrencies on its cryptocurrency page.
If your website is hosted with Noiz and you are unsure whether anything blocks archive crawlers, open a ticket and we will check it with you.
Sources
Checked 19 October 2026.
- Internet Archive: about
- Internet Archive: donate and cryptocurrency donations
- Internet Archive Help Center: save pages in the Wayback Machine
- Internet Archive Help Center: using the Wayback Machine
- About Noiz
Note: while some of this content was produced with the help of AI, the final editing has been done by a real human being.
