FAQ | Aleph Archives

About Aleph Archives

Aleph Archives is an enterprise web archiving platform trusted by Fortune 500 companies and regulated organisations worldwide. We capture, preserve, and replay entire websites in their native format — producing legally defensible, ISO 28500-compliant archives with cryptographic verification.

Screenshots capture a flat image of a single moment — they miss interactive content, embedded media, and anything below the fold. The Wayback Machine is a public archive with no legal defensibility, no guaranteed capture schedule, and no cryptographic verification.

Aleph Archives captures your website in its native format — the full HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, video, and metadata — stored in ISO 28500 WARC files with SHA-512 and RIPEMD-160 hash signatures. The result is a browsable, interactive archive that is court-admissible and tamper-evident.

Our clients include global banks, insurance companies, asset managers, pharmaceutical firms, government agencies, and law firms. Any organisation that needs to prove what was published on their website — for regulatory compliance, litigation, or internal governance — is a good fit for Aleph Archives.

Aleph Archives has been providing institutional web archiving services since 2010. We have over 15 years of experience capturing complex, dynamic websites for regulated industries.

Capture Technology

Aleph Vault uses a full browser engine to visit every page of your website, executing JavaScript, rendering dynamic content, and capturing the page exactly as a real visitor would see it. We navigate through the entire site — following links, triggering interactive elements, and collecting all associated resources (images, video, stylesheets, scripts, metadata).

The result is stored in ISO 28500 WARC format alongside PDF and PNG renderings of each page.

Yes. Unlike conventional crawlers that only fetch raw HTML, Aleph Vault renders every page in a full browser environment. This means we capture JavaScript-rendered content, React/Angular/Vue applications, embedded widgets, AJAX-loaded data, image carousels, video players, and any other dynamic content — exactly as your visitors experience it.

Yes. Aleph Vault can authenticate into gated portals, accept cookie consent dialogs, and trigger geo-specific content. We capture what your users actually see — including personalised dashboards, A/B test variants, and region-specific pages.

Yes. Aleph Vault captures virtually anything visible in a browser — embedded video players, modal pop-ups, drop-down menus, hover states, interactive calculators, forms, and image carousels. All interactive elements are preserved and replayable in the archive.

No. Aleph Vault behaves like a regular website visitor. Our professional services team configures capture settings to minimise any footprint, including scheduling captures during off-peak hours and excluding analytics tracking.

Yes. You can configure automated capture schedules — daily, weekly, monthly, or on-demand. You can also trigger captures based on detected changes to your website. Aleph Vault monitors capture status and alerts your team if any issues arise.

Aleph Archives has captured websites with hundreds of thousands of pages. We work with your team to define the right scope — controlling crawl depth, URL patterns, file type inclusions/exclusions, and third-party link handling. Our experience across thousands of capture projects ensures accurate scoping from the start.

Archives & Replay

A WARC (Web ARChive) file is the international standard format (ISO 28500:2017) for storing captured web content. It preserves the original HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, and all associated metadata exactly as delivered from the web server. WARC files are vendor-neutral, future-proof, and used by national libraries and government archives worldwide.

Native format means we preserve the original web content exactly as it was delivered — not a screenshot, not a stripped-down HTML export, but the complete set of resources that make up each page. This allows the archive to be replayed with full interactivity, working links, and original styling.

Yes. Aleph Vault’s replay engine renders archived pages in their native format. You can click through links, scroll through content, view interactive elements, and experience the site exactly as it appeared on the date of capture. Compliance reviewers, legal counsel, and regulators can review content in full context.

Yes. Aleph Vault indexes every capture with full-text search. You can find any page, phrase, disclaimer, or product claim across your complete archive history — filtering by date range, URL pattern, or content type. Results are available in seconds.

You can export archives as ISO 28500 WARC files, searchable PDFs, MHTML files, or Relativity-compatible .DAT load files. All exports include cryptographic hash values for authentication. PDF and PNG renderings are generated automatically with every capture.

Yes. Aleph Vault allows side-by-side comparison of any archived page across different capture dates — making it easy to see exactly what changed and when. This is particularly useful for compliance reviews, marketing approvals, and regulatory examinations.

Security & Data Protection

Every page captured by Aleph Vault is immediately signed with dual cryptographic hashes — SHA-512 and RIPEMD-160. These signatures create mathematically verifiable proof that the archive has not been altered since the moment of capture. Any modification is instantly detectable.

WORM stands for Write Once, Read Many. Once an archive is written to WORM storage, it cannot be modified, overwritten, or deleted — not even by Aleph Archives engineers. This immutability is required by regulations such as SEC Rule 17a-4 and is essential for legal defensibility.

Aleph Archives offers dedicated hosting in Switzerland and across the European Economic Area (EEA). Your data never leaves your chosen jurisdiction without explicit consent. We do not use shared US cloud infrastructure.

Aleph Archives maintains SOC 2 Type II operational controls, TLS 1.3 encryption for all data in transit, role-based access control (RBAC) with granular permissions, and an immutable audit trail for all platform activity. Our infrastructure is designed for 99.9% availability with automated failover across geographically distributed data centres.

You control the retention schedule. Archives are stored as long as you need them — whether that is the standard seven-year retention period for financial services or a custom schedule aligned with your regulatory requirements. Legal holds and retention exceptions are fully supported.

Compliance & Legal

Aleph Archives satisfies record-keeping requirements across major regulatory frameworks:

SEC Rule 17a-4 and FINRA 2210 — US financial services
FCA COBS 4 and MiFID II — UK and European financial regulation
ESMA Guidelines — European securities markets
FDA 21 CFR Part 11 — Healthcare and pharmaceutical
GDPR and Swiss FADP — Data protection and privacy
HIPAA — Healthcare information security

Yes. Attestation letters confirming our role as a books-and-records custodian are a standard part of the Aleph Archives agreement. We have provided dozens of affidavits and declarations, and our team has testified as expert witnesses on numerous occasions.

You have multiple options: exported PDFs (available instantly), Relativity-compatible load files, native format WARC exports, and offline working replicas of captured sites. All exports include cryptographic hash values for authentication.

Yes. Aleph Archives supports retention management, legal holds, disposition schedules, and automated notifications for records approaching their retention expiry.

Getting Started

Both. Most clients use Aleph Archives as a cloud-hosted SaaS platform. Enterprise customers with specific data residency or security requirements can deploy an on-premise instance within their own infrastructure.

Very little. The platform is designed to be intuitive for compliance reviewers and legal teams. Admin and engineering users receive additional onboarding. Most teams are fully productive within a single training session.

No. Aleph Archives does not charge for users. You can add as many team members as you need, with full role-based access control to manage permissions.

Yes. Aleph Archives provides LDAP and SAML integration for enterprise single sign-on and centralised user management.

Contact our team to schedule a demo. We will walk you through the platform, capture your own website in front of you, and discuss how Aleph Archives fits your specific compliance requirements.