Recently it was World Digital Preservation Day. We might not always think about the need to preserve digital resources. If you rely on using a website for your work (or just for fun), you might assume that it will be backed up to the cloud somewhere and will be recoverable in the event of a digital disaster. But this is not the case.
There are amazing resources like the Wayback Machine that have catalogued over 1 trillion web pages, but there are still many gaps. For example, as of November 2026 the Wayback Machine has captured the home page of this very website 130 times over 17 years. My ‘About’ page has only had 33 captures, and only 13 individual blog posts in the last decade have been captured (and none from this year).
In the UK, we also have the UK Web Archive that performs a similar function for some UK websites. This was only recently restored after a cyberattack of the British Library in 2023 ended up taking it offline for over two years. Also, like the Wayback Machine, it does not capture every page on the internet.
Preserving my own digital content
I've slowly been making a catalogue of every website and blog that I've ever been involved in creating or maintaining. I'm currently up to 21 websites and haven't finished yet (see some of my other recent blog posts for more details). For most of the blogs I've created, I have most of the posts stored as digital note files. Everything on my computer is backed up many times, to many different places.
But this wasn't always the case. Platforms come and go and if you rely on a free software solution you have very few guarantees that the service will stay around forever. As someone who used to have a blog hosted on iWeb and then Posterous—two platforms that no longer exist — I know this from first-hand experience.
I'm kind of sad that, despite being a bit of a digital packrat, I've still lost a few blog posts over time. I wish I had been more organised from the outset because — just like moving house — if you keep switching to different CMSs and hosting providers, you *will* end up losing material along the way.
Who owns your data?
Maybe you've written a blog post that you hope that one day your grandchildren will read in order to learn more about you. Don't rely on that blog post living only on a single online platform. And if you don't own the platform (a website and domain name you control), then the risks are magnified.
Although I pay for a domain name and pay for the CMS that I use to host my blog, I realise that I'm still reliant on a third-party (Squarespace) and that I don't fully own the platform myself. That's why I make sure that I have copies of my posts saved on my computer (and backed up).
What can you do?
Here's some simple digital preservation advice for anyone who has their own website:
1. Keep a digital copy of things like blog posts outside of the CMS / blogging platform where you will post them.
2. Store those notes in a format that ideally isn't owned by anyone and doesn't require a license to use (plain text / Markdown is ideal).
3. Back up all of your files.
4. Back up all of your files (repeating this point as it's important)
5. Back up all of your files (this point really does bear repeating and one backup is not enough)
But that's only half the story…
Backups != preservation
And it is important to note that backups are the start of a solution, but only a start. Backing up is not the same as preserving. Bit rot — the degradation of digital data — is a real issue and true digital preservation requires you to ensure that you can restore from backups and check that the data is intact.
The more complex your digital content, the more challenging it will be to back up, restore and test that content is all working. So if you own a blog, put some time in the calendar to check that you have copies of all of the posts and (ideally) check that someone else would be able to open them on their computer.
At the time of writing I’ve posted to this blog 17 times this year and as noted above, none of those posts are available in the Wayback Machine. Digital content, if not actively preserved, can so easily be lost like tears in rain.
