Web archiving
provable, reliable, within Europe

What website archiving records

A web archive is not a backup. A backup helps you restorea site; an archive records irrefutably how your organisation communicated online — including layout, content and links, exactly as visitors saw it. We carry out that capture periodically, deliver reproducible WARC archives and store them securely within Europe.

• Periodic runsHourly, daily, weekly, monthly or annually — aligned with your policy.
• Reproducible (WARC)ISO 28500 archives, the same format that national archives and libraries use.
• Two crawlersA fast static crawl or Browsertrix for JavaScript-rich sites and SPAs.
• Provably recordedChecksums, a digital signature and an RFC 3161 timestamp per archive.
• Storage within EuropeAn EU data centre by default; if you wish, we connect your own S3 bucket.
• Replay & offlineA live replay portal and offline consultation with the ReplayWeb viewer.

Who is this relevant for?

In the Netherlands, government organisations are obliged to archive their websites under the Dutch Archives Act. A good archive also helps with Woo requests and internal supervision: you demonstrate what was online at a given moment. In regulated sectors, too, transparency is often anchored in laws and regulations — think of financial services, healthcare and education — where the provability of publications carries a lot of weight.

How it works — from crawl to evidence

Once you give the go-ahead, we set up a workflow per website and go through five steps. After that the process repeats automatically at the agreed frequency.

• 1 · InventoryWe map out the site and estimate storage and computing time.
• 2 · CrawlingStatically or with Browsertrix we capture every page and asset.
• 3 · WARC + signatureWe bundle everything into WARC, with checksums, a signature and a timestamp.
• 4 · Storage in the EUThe archive goes to a European data centre or to your own S3 bucket.
• 5 · Replay & transferYou browse through time, share publicly or transfer to an e-Depot.

Two crawlers, one archive

Not every site is captured in the same way. For regular sites a fast, light static crawl is enough. Sites with a lot of JavaScript or a single-page architecture we capture with Browsertrix, which drives a real browser and so also includes dynamic components.

Not sure? We recommend Browsertrix as standard: it also captures menus, interactions and dynamic components that a static crawl misses. You can switch per website.

Social media archiving

Online communication does not stop at your website. Your presence on social media is captured periodically too — handy for government bodies and organisations that also have to preserve their posts on social channels demonstrably, for example for the Dutch Archives Act or Woo requests.

• Facebook Public pages, posts and comments as visitors saw them.
• Instagram Public profiles, photos and reels from your channel.
• Mastodon Public toots and profiles from the fediverse.
• Bluesky Public posts and profiles from the AT Protocol.

We capture the public channels — in line with what each platform allows — and deliver them in the same reproducible archive, with checksums and a timestamp.

Provable and irrefutable

We deliver every archive in WARC 1.1 (ISO 28500) — the international standard for web archives, in which the original bytes of every page and asset are preserved. To make the integrity demonstrable, we seal every archive:

Format

WARC 1.1 (ISO 28500), preserving the original bytes and compression

Checksums

SHA-256 and SHA-512 over every WARC file and the search data

Signature

GPG/PGP-signed manifest (manifest.json with a detached signature)

Timestamp

RFC 3161, anchored externally via OpenTimestamps

Validation

WARC conformity checked with warcio

Verification

Checksums and signature can be re-verified at any time

One deviating byte and you know it: the checksums no longer match and the signature is exposed. That is how you demonstrate irrefutably what was online at which moment.

Storage within Europe

Privacy and digital sovereignty come first. By default we store archives in a European data centre (Scaleway, EU). Would you like more control? Then we connect your own S3 bucket — AWS, MinIO or a compatible provider — or we store to several destinations at once for extra redundancy. Subsequent crawls store only the changes incrementally, so storage stays manageable.

Frequency and fine-tuning

Per website you set exactly how and how often we capture, so the archive matches your archiving and retention policy.

• FrequencyFrom hourly to annually, or automatically via an API call after a change.
• Scope & depthThe whole site or sub-paths, with a configurable maximum click depth.
• Include or exclude pathsInclude specific sections or exclude them using patterns.
• JavaScript renderingEnable rendering per workflow for dynamic pages.
• Baseline + incrementalA first full capture, then efficient updates.
• API & webhooksStart crawls and receive signals in your own systems.

Transfer to an e-Depot

Does an archive eventually have to go to an e-Depot? That takes place via dual signing. Both you and we sign the manifest; without your signature nothing can be transferred or deleted. That way you always retain a built-in right of veto. A deletion — on the basis of the GDPR, for example — is also a separate, signed and logged action, so an irrefutable trail remains of what has happened. On transfer we supply the metadata MDTO-compliant — the standard Metagegevens voor Duurzaam Toegankelijke Overheidsinformatie of the Dutch National Archives — so that the archive can be admitted directly into a government e-Depot.

Replay — live through time

Alongside the WARC delivery we provide a replay portal that you place on your own site. Visitors choose a year, month and day and see the site exactly as it looked at the time — as if they were travelling back in time. Journalists and researchers can also download the WARC files and open them in their own viewer. View a sample archive to see how that works in practice.

Offline consultation

Archives can also be viewed without an internet connection using the ReplayWeb viewer — handy for audits, case files and situations without a live connection. You open the WARC file locally and navigate through the archived site just as before.

How we work and how to apply

After your request we take stock of the site, estimate storage and computing time and you receive a quotation. Once you agree, we start within a few days. Usually no CMS access is needed: we crawl the public site as a visitor sees it. Behind our service runs InnoARCHIVE, our own platform for web archiving and governance.

Frequently asked questions