About this tool

Why it exists

A site goes down, there is no backup, and the only surviving copy is in a web archive that was never designed to hand it back. The Wayback Machine is built for reading one page at a time, which is the wrong shape for anyone trying to recover a whole site.

This is a small independent operation, not a company with a support desk. Requests are handled by hand, which is why replies take a day rather than a minute, and why the price is $12 rather than a subscription.

How the restore works

It asks the Internet Archive’s index which URLs it holds for a domain. It fetches each captured page as it was recorded, without the Archive’s own toolbar injected into the HTML. It rewrites the links so the copy browses on your machine instead of reaching back out to a site that no longer exists. Then it writes everything to disk in the directory structure the original used.

That is the whole method. There is no proprietary index and no private archive. Everything it reads is public, and you could do it by hand with enough patience.

What it will not do

It cannot recover anything the Archive never captured. Coverage is uneven and no tool changes that, which is why the front page checks coverage before it asks you for anything.

It returns the front end only. HTML, CSS, images and scripts. Never a database, server code, or an admin panel. A restored site is a copy of the output, not of the machine that produced it.

It is not affiliated with the Internet Archive, does not speak for them, and is not endorsed by them.

A word about the Archive

The Internet Archive is a nonprofit, and every restore this tool performs is a cost they absorb. Requests are rate-limited and identify themselves honestly rather than pretending to be a browser.

If this tool is useful to you, donate to the Internet Archive. They are the reason any of this is possible.