In the course of doing internet research for a project I’m working on, I’ll often come across links that lead me directly to 404 errors. When that happens, I often go to the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive, which has preserved hundreds of terabytes of data since 1996.
While the records preserved there can’t be used as legal evidence, they are a goldmine if you’re looking for snapshots of all sorts of stuff, like companies’ web presences back in the day (here’s Apple.com ten years ago). Plus, when you click on a link from an archived web page, you get taken to another archived page from the same time.
