Extract from Hanzo’s article, “Website Archiving Vs. Preservation: 5 Tests Your Web Archive Needs to Pass In Regulatory Audits.”
A regulator asks what your website said about a fund’s fees on a specific date last year. Your team finds a scheduled screenshot from that week and a PDF someone saved to a shared drive. Neither shows who captured it or whether it has changed since, and neither shows what sat below the visible part of the page.
This is where website archiving and preservation part ways. Both keep copies of web content. Preservation adds the controls that let a copy stand up as evidence when a regulator or a court looks closely.
Website archiving vs. preservation: what’s the difference?
Website archiving keeps copies of web pages over time. Preservation keeps those copies in a form that can be proven authentic: stored so they can’t be altered, and tied to the metadata of the original capture. A scheduled screenshot tool archives. A preservation system can show a regulator when a page was captured and prove that nothing has changed since.
