If you love a website, back it up

The article, a personal essay by a web archiving professional, recounts the loss of teapuppies.com, a fansite for the anime and toy line Ochaken that had been online since 2004 and unchanged since 2005, only to disappear and have its domain repurposed for online gambling ads. The author argues that web preservation should not be left solely to large organizations like the Internet Archive, urging individuals to proactively back up websites they care about. The piece highlights tools built on standard web archiving formats such as WARC, including the ArchiveWeb.page browser extension, noting that many are free, while disclosing the author works for the company that makes them. The article demonstrates that entire archived websites can be embedded, browsed, and downloaded from blog posts. For a financial news wire, the relevance lies in the growing importance of digital preservation tools and standards. Watch for adoption of personal archiving tools and the broader market for web archiving technology.