Ask Lemmy

All the time. For websites that are no longer online, it's invaluable, what's the alternative?

Things which happened get forgotten because they're deleted. If something like Internet Archive exists that's no longer a problem.

It’s a trove of primary source material for historians. Even presuming you don’t personally use it yourself it’s a crucial archive of human history that all will benefit from

I use it quite often. I can still download some books from The Trove (RIP), it also has all sorts of abandonware and console rom collections. It also has a decent collection of gaming magazines and CDs that would come bundled with them. There's also an incredible variety of books in there, and older programming books always catch my attention.

I've also watched the 1930 All Quiet on the Western Front film there. It's the kind of thing that pirate sites and streaming services don't bother with, because there's no demand.

A long time ago I was repairing my dad's camera, I found an article describing the exact fault & a link to how to fix it, but the link was dead.

Used the wayback machine to find a text only copy of the fix (no pictures) which was enough.

Was immensely proud that someone had had the idea to invent the IA & have been recommending it ever since.

reading defunct webcomics

I've used it extensively to recover old CSS themes, images, and read long dead websites. There are a couple of lost songs I found downloads for there too! I've also saved a couple of pages that I haven't had to use but it would be useful neutral third party evidence. Is it daily? No, but it's an absolute blessing to have.

I use it to find old software and games for my retro PC projects, currently working on a Windows XP gaming machine and maybe a DOS machine afterwards.

Without the Internet Archive it would have been a lot harder to find software.

And I love the wayback machine for looking up old websites.

roms. endless roms.

I just bought and restored some older but well-built deck furniture. Each piece had a badge on it with a company name and URL, but the site is long gone. Popped it into the wayback machine and instantly learned all about the furniture, its maker, and how much it cost back in the day, which was really neat.

Wayback machine very often. I also like to watch The Computer Chronicles which is on IA. I can also get old installation ISOs from there.

Bypassing paywalled articles.

There's old movies there, too.

I've used it for old cookbooks.

through time

Dude, you're saying this as though the internet has been around for millennia. And as if you've never been to / heard of a library.

I've downloaded a ton of music videos to create my own self-hosted MTV station. I've downloaded music and books. I've used it to view non-paywalled (NYT) articles shared on Lemmy. I live in Philadelphia so I've used it to look up the earliest version of the "yellow pages" or "white pages" from the 1800s. I've searched for the videos they used to show us in elementary school on 16mm - stuff about the expansion of the USA, the national parks, history of my state or city, etc. I've used it to look up tv commercials from the 1980s for a bit of nostalgia and older tv shows that people have uploaded from their personal VHS collection. Some people just upload personal stuff that's entirely mundane but voyeuristically interesting. And I'm certain I haven't even scratched the surface of what's on there.

Sometimes, rarely. Saved my ass once or twice!

i don't know why but my particular browsing habits lead me to a lot of defunct websites so yea

I use the Wayback machine sometimes.

Norm MacDonald's old youtube podcast is on there, while it's hard to find anywhere else (they took it down from youtube when he got his Netflix show).

I've found public domain pictures on there, and I've spent time browsing very old music.

I went down a rabbithole of comparing evolving definitions of words by reading through generations of dictionaries. That would be hard to do without the IA. As well as comparing versions of books that I was considering buying.

Grateful Dead concert recordings and downloading old software/ roms.

I do - there are old sites that have gone off line that I search the Way Back Machine to look at. There are also lots of archived files available that I've used more than once (Amiga files for example, Usenet archives and even old magazines).

It's not really a day-to-day tool for everyone, but when you need it it's irreplaceable.

I use it all the time for books and audiobooks.

But I must say, that I read A LOT and don't want to always read the new and popular stuff. Especially if you leave mainstream and the big markets (US, UK and Europe) you can find a lot of great books by authors from smaller countries that are not available otherwise. Often the translations are out of print and never been available as ebook and the scanned and digitised version by the Internet Archive is the only one I can find.

Ever tried to read the Chinese classic epos "Journey to the west" in full (not just the monkey King story)? It's in the archive. Or have you heard of one of Surinames most important writers Cynthia McLeod or read the poetry collection of Guyanese writer Grace Nichols? Or a translation of Syrias most important Poet Adunis? The Internet Archive has it all. You just have to look for it.

It also has the free domain classics from several other projects all in one place. And not to forget old movies and television. I recently watched "9 to 5" the feminist classic with Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda and Lilly Tomlin there recently because no other streaming service had it.

Of course if you are only into blockbusters and bestsellers, the Internet Archive can't help you there.

I feel like everytime I try to use the wayback machine, it just gives an error.

They have movies

They've got a lot of old manuals scanned in, so I use it to reference those a lot.

Back up my blog site in case I fuck something up

Just for look at older versions of sites

Wayback Machine, all the time. Very useful if a reference link on Wikipedia is dead (why do websites just remove articles like that? It drives me nuts). Unfortunately it doesn't handle JavaScript very well, rendering some functions of websites unusable, or breaking images. I particularly remember browsing the website for Al Jazeera Children's Channel (which is jcctv.net by the way), they had a theme switcher which unfortunately uses JS, so... I'm stuck with the blue underwater theme for some reason. And yes, Al Jazeera did do lots of non-news related stuff at one point.

The Internet Archive can be useful as well if you're looking for a very niche thing that isn't really available elsewhere. I usually use it for software, but at one point I tried searching it for an archive of Club Penguin's game files. They also have lots of public domain stuff if you're interested in that (friendly reminder: Steamboat Willie is part of it now).

It's neat for getting around the paywall of some online articles. Although Firefox reader mode usually does the trick already.

I've been experimenting with trying to reverse engineer Overwatch 1. I was able to find lots of builds through Internet Archive when i was starting

Yep there are tons of great videos on there. Norm MacDonald's podcast, Wonder Showzen, MTV Liquid Television et cetera