Not All Digital Archiving Is Created Equal
The term “digital archiving” is used broadly across the technology industry, often without distinction between vastly different levels of technical difficulty. A company that connects to the Slack API and stores structured JSON messages calls itself a digital archiving provider. A company that captures the full interactive state of a modern JavaScript-driven website, complete with dynamic content, embedded media, and responsive layouts, also calls itself a digital archiving provider. These are not the same thing.
There is a spectrum of difficulty in digital preservation, and it ranges from the relatively straightforward task of collecting structured data through well-documented APIs to the enormously complex challenge of capturing the live, chaotic, ever-changing web. Understanding this spectrum is essential for any organisation evaluating archiving solutions, because the engineering depth required at each level differs by orders of magnitude.
After fifteen years of building web archiving technology – since 2010, when Aleph Archives was founded in Switzerland – we can state with confidence: web archiving is the hardest problem in digital preservation. It is the reason we exist, and it is the reason we have never diversified into easier categories. The problem demands total focus.
The Archiving Difficulty Spectrum
To understand why web archiving stands apart, it helps to map the full landscape of digital archiving by technical complexity. Each category below represents a fundamentally different engineering challenge.
1. Cloud Storage Archiving (Easiest)
Connect to the Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox API. Receive structured files with known formats, metadata, and folder hierarchies. The cloud provider has already done the heavy lifting: files are organised, versioned, and accessible through clean REST endpoints. The archiving system receives data in predictable formats – PDFs, spreadsheets, documents – and stores them. The principal challenge is scale and retention management, not data capture.
2. Messaging and Collaboration Archiving (Easy)
Connect to the Slack, Microsoft Teams, Bloomberg, or Symphony API. Receive structured messages with timestamps, author identifiers, thread hierarchies, reactions, and attachments neatly organised in JSON. The data arrives pre-structured with rich metadata. Companies in this space – including competitors like Hanzo with their Illuminate platform for Slack and Teams, or MirrorWeb offering capture of WhatsApp, SMS, and iMessage – are fundamentally consuming API output. The conversations are already digital-native and machine-readable. The engineering challenge is significant but bounded: handle message volume, preserve threading context, and maintain chain of custody.
3. Social Media Archiving (Moderate)
Connect to the Meta, LinkedIn, or X (formerly Twitter) platform APIs. Receive structured posts, comments, reactions, and media attachments. As Pagefreezer describes on their own platform, their software “automatically captures and archives social media content through platform-specific APIs, preserving posts, comments, edits, deletions, and metadata.” The key phrase is through platform-specific APIs. The data provider does the heavy lifting of structuring the information. The archiving provider consumes it. Complexity increases due to media attachments, rate limits, and evolving API specifications, but the fundamental architecture remains: connect to an API, receive structured data, store it.
4. Email Archiving (Moderate)
Connect to Exchange, Gmail, or any IMAP/MAPI-compatible server. Receive structured messages with headers, bodies, attachments, and threading metadata. Email is one of the oldest digital communication formats, governed by well-established protocols dating back decades. The data model is mature and predictable. Compliance requirements are well understood – SEC Rule 17a-4, FINRA Rule 4511, and their equivalents worldwide have created clear specifications for what email archives must contain and how long they must be retained. The engineering challenges are real – volume, attachment handling, deduplication – but the data arrives in known formats through standardised interfaces.
5. Web Archiving (Hardest)
There is no API. There is no structured data format. There is no standardised interface. Every website is different. The only “API” available is a web browser rendering engine – and it must handle everything the modern web throws at it.
This is where the difficulty curve goes vertical.
Why Web Archiving Is Different
When a competitor archives Slack messages, their system connects to a documented API and receives clean JSON. When a competitor archives social media posts, their system authenticates with a platform and receives structured data. When we archive a website, our system must do what a human being does: open a browser, render the page, interact with it, and capture what appears. Except it must do this at scale, with perfect fidelity, for thousands of pages, across sites that are actively trying to prevent automated access.
Here is what makes web archiving the hardest problem in digital preservation.
No Standardised Interface
Slack has one API. Google Drive has one API. A website has no API – or rather, every website is its own API, and every single one is different. The structure, navigation, content loading patterns, authentication requirements, and technical implementation vary completely from one site to the next. There is no SDK, no documentation, no schema. Each site must be individually crawled, rendered, and captured.
JavaScript-Driven Content
A website from 2010 could often be archived by downloading its HTML files. Those days are long gone. A modern website in 2026 may execute thousands of JavaScript calls before any visible content appears on screen. Frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue have transformed websites into full applications running inside the browser. As even our competitors acknowledge – MirrorWeb advertises the ability to “archive even the most dynamic content, including JavaScript-heavy apps built with React, Angular, and Vue” – this is a widely recognised challenge. A traditional HTTP crawler that simply downloads HTML will see an empty page, because the content does not exist until JavaScript executes and renders it.
Single-Page Applications
Modern single-page applications (SPAs) never reload the page. Navigation happens entirely through JavaScript, dynamically replacing content without generating new HTTP requests. The URL may change, but the page never reloads. For a traditional web crawler, an SPA looks like a single page with a single URL. All the internal navigation, all the content sections, all the interactive elements – invisible to anything that does not execute JavaScript and simulate user interaction.
Authentication and Personalisation
Content behind login walls, cookie consent dialogs, geofencing rules, A/B testing configurations, and user-specific personalisation layers means that the same URL can display entirely different content depending on who visits it, where they are located, and what device they use. MirrorWeb explicitly advertises the ability to capture “user-specific views” and “geolocation” variants – a clear acknowledgment that this is a real and difficult challenge. There is no API endpoint that returns “the” content of a personalised page, because that content does not exist in a single canonical form.
Anti-Bot Measures
Websites actively resist automated access. CAPTCHAs, rate limiting, Cloudflare protection, browser fingerprinting, and behavioural analysis are designed specifically to detect and block the kind of automated access that web archiving requires. Every time a new anti-bot technology emerges, web archiving systems must evolve to maintain access. There is no equivalent challenge in API-based archiving – Slack does not try to prevent its own API from being used.
Multimedia Complexity
Embedded YouTube and Vimeo videos, audio players, interactive maps, 3D content rendered with WebGL, data visualisations built with D3.js – modern websites contain rich multimedia that must be captured in context. A video embedded in a product page is not just a video file; it is a video player rendered within a specific layout, with specific controls, at a specific position. Capturing the page means capturing all of this in a way that can be faithfully replayed.
Infinite Scrolling and Lazy Loading
Content that only appears when the user scrolls, images that load on demand, “load more” buttons that fetch additional data – these patterns mean that the full content of a page is never available at initial load. A web archiving system must simulate human browsing behaviour: scrolling, waiting, clicking, scrolling again, until all content has been rendered and captured. As Hanzo notes with their Chronicle product, this includes “web sliders, videos, dropdowns, ROI calculators, forms, and customized customer journeys” – content that requires interaction to be revealed.
Frequent Changes
A news website may publish hundreds of articles per day. An e-commerce site may change prices hourly. A corporate website may update regulatory disclosures at any moment. The live web is not static. Determining the right capture frequency, detecting meaningful changes, and maintaining a coherent archive over time requires continuous engineering investment.
CSS and Responsive Design Complexity
The same page renders differently on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices. Responsive design means the layout, images, and even content blocks may change based on viewport size. A complete archive must account for these variations, because a page viewed on a smartphone may look materially different from the same URL viewed on a desktop monitor.
Third-Party Dependencies
A modern website does not exist in isolation. It pulls resources from dozens of external domains: CDN-hosted JavaScript libraries, web fonts from Google or Adobe, analytics scripts, comment systems, chat widgets, embedded social media feeds, advertising networks. All of these external resources are part of the page as the user experiences it. If any of them change, disappear, or become unavailable, the archived version must still render correctly. Capturing a website means capturing its entire dependency graph.
The ISO 28500 WARC Standard
The sheer complexity of web content is precisely why a specialised file format was created for it. The Web ARChive (WARC) file format, standardised as ISO 28500:2017, was developed because web content is too complex, too varied, and too dynamic to be preserved in any standard file format.
A WARC file captures the complete HTTP request-response cycle for every resource: the request headers, the response headers, the response body, the timestamps, and comprehensive metadata. This is the only format that preserves the full technical context of a web capture – not just what was displayed, but how it was delivered.
The industry recognises this. Even competitors store their web archives in WARC format. MirrorWeb describes providing “time-stamped, immutable records in ISO-standard WARC format.” Hanzo states their content is “preserved in WARC file format consistent with ISO 28500 on immutable (WORM) storage.”
At Aleph Archives, every archive is stored in fully ISO 28500-compliant WARC files, secured with dual cryptographic signatures using SHA-512 and RIPEMD-160 hashing algorithms. This dual-signature approach ensures tamper-evident, legally defensible archives. Any modification to an archived file – even a single bit – is immediately detectable. This level of cryptographic integrity is not a feature we added to a broader platform. It is foundational to everything we build, because web archiving is all we do.
Why API-Based Archiving Is Comparatively Simple
This is not a criticism of API-based archiving. It serves legitimate compliance needs. But the engineering reality must be understood.
When you archive Slack messages via API, your system authenticates, calls a documented endpoint, and receives structured JSON with timestamps, authors, thread identifiers, and content neatly organised. The data format is defined by the platform provider. The metadata is comprehensive and consistent. The system scales predictably.
When you archive a website, your system must: discover all pages through crawling and sitemap analysis; render JavaScript in a full browser engine; handle dynamic content loading and lazy initialisation; simulate user interactions to reveal hidden content; capture embedded multimedia in context; preserve responsive layouts across viewports; manage authentication and session state; navigate anti-bot protections; resolve and capture all third-party dependencies; store the complete HTTP transaction in WARC format; verify integrity with cryptographic signatures; and enable faithful replay in a standard browser.
The engineering effort required for web archiving is not incrementally greater than API-based archiving. It is fundamentally different in kind. This explains an observable pattern in the industry: companies that began with web archiving have increasingly diversified into API-based archiving of social media, messaging, email, and collaboration platforms. The commercial logic is clear. API-based archiving offers a broader addressable market with more predictable engineering challenges and faster time to revenue. MirrorWeb now positions itself as a “unified platform” for web, social media, email, messaging, and mobile communications. Hanzo has expanded from web archiving into Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace, and SaaS application governance. Pagefreezer archives websites, social media, Microsoft Teams, and enterprise collaboration tools.
The question is: what happens to the depth of web archiving expertise when it becomes one feature among many?
Solving the Hardest Problem
This is what Aleph Archives has spent fifteen years doing. Nothing else.
While competitors have built broader platforms spanning multiple archiving categories, we have invested every year of engineering effort into one problem: capturing the live web as it actually appears. Not flat screenshots. Not partial HTML downloads. Full interactive archives that can be replayed in a browser exactly as they appeared on the day of capture.
Our technology continuously evolves to keep pace with new web frameworks, browser engine updates, JavaScript rendering techniques, and anti-bot measures. When a new version of React changes how content loads, we adapt. When a new CDN introduces novel caching behaviour, we handle it. When a new anti-bot system emerges, we engineer around it. This is what focused expertise produces – a relentless, compounding investment in solving the same hard problem, year after year.
Every archive we produce is stored in ISO 28500-compliant WARC files with dual cryptographic signatures. Every archive can be replayed interactively. Every archive preserves the full technical context of the original capture. This is not a feature in a product catalogue. It is our entire reason for being.
Choosing a Web Archiving Provider
Organisations evaluating web archiving solutions should understand the nature of what they are buying. A provider that treats web archiving as one product line among many – alongside messaging archiving, social media archiving, email archiving, and cloud storage archiving – necessarily distributes its engineering resources across all of these domains. Each API change from Slack, each new compliance requirement from the SEC, each new social media platform feature demands development attention that could otherwise be spent on the relentlessly difficult problem of capturing the live web.
A provider that does nothing but web archiving concentrates every resource on the hardest problem. Fifteen years of that concentration produces depth that cannot be replicated by a team splitting its attention across a dozen different archiving categories.
The web will only get more complex. JavaScript frameworks will continue to evolve. Single-page applications will become more sophisticated. Anti-bot measures will grow more aggressive. New multimedia formats will emerge. The gap between what a website displays and what a simple HTTP request returns will continue to widen.
The problem will only get harder. And we will be here, solving it.
