Wayback machines are online tools that can help you see back in time, but limited to the internet world.
If you want to see how instagram was in 2002, or if you just want to see someone’s profile on instagram, wayback in time, you can do so.
However, most people don’t know how to use wayback machine for instagram properly. You may have even got blocked by the wayback machine.
In this post, I am going to show you the right way to use wayback machine instagram.
Can we use wayback machine for instagram?
Yes, you can use an online tool called Web Archive to look at the past instagram profiles.
This tool can be used to look at the various instagram profile, their updates, and their regular activities they have been doing.
Although, a very important thing that needs to be noted here is wayback machine don’t capture every activity of instagram. They crawl the website from different-different time, and keep crawling and saving them into their database.
Hence, it might be possible that many of the screenshot may not have been captured in wayback machine, because they were not crawled at that time.
Also, wayback machine doesn’t work properly and you may need a lot of patience to load it.
How to use wayback machine for instagram?
To use wayback machine or Web Archive took for instagram, get the url of instagram page you want to check. Next, paste the URL into the wayback machine search bar and press ENTER. Select the timestamp and click on the date to see older version of that instagram profile/page.
Here’s the step-by-step guide:
Step 1: Get profle URL and paste it to wayback machine
To use wayback machine instagram, you must have a URL of the page or the profile. You then have to paste that profile URL to the wayback machine search box.
To get profile URL, use https://instagram.com/user-name and replace “usern-name” with the actual user that you want to check on wayback machine.
Please note that you can not see any private instagram account using wayback machine. You can only see public accounts and varified public accounts in wayback machine.
Step 2: Pick the date from the calender
Once you’ve submitted the URL to the wayback machine, it will load the calender with a lot of dates. These dates are when the wayback machine crawled this specific instagram profile.
Click the date and see the result.
It maybe possible that wayback machine will through any error and it won’t allow you to see the private accounts or unpopular accounts of instagram.
Step 3: See the result
Once you pick the date from the calender map, you you will be redirected to the internet view of that page for that specific date.
Although, it won’t show you all the information of that instagram profile.
What to do if wayback machine isn’t working for instagram?
As I mentioned previously, it maybe possible that the wayback machine may not work for a specific username or any private account.
This is one of the biggest drawbacks of using wayback machine.
Further, the server of the wayback machine take a lot of time to respond and in many cases, it got crashed.
But, despite having all these problems with wayback machine, still, it is one of the best tools available on internet to see arvhived screenshots of websites.
There is, however, a few alternatives of wayback machine, like archive.ph, which is almost similar to the web arvhive.
Is it legal to use wayback machine?
Yes, using wayback machine to see the archived pages on internet is completely legal. However, in a few countries it has been banned due to copyright issues. For example, china and Europe is banning wayback machine to save archived pages of internet.
Although, being a normal user, you can use wayback machine to see the archived pages of your instagram profile.
Can we see private instagram account on wayback machine?
As the name suggest, “private” accounts on instagram are not crawled at all by the wayback machine and hence, you can not see the archived pages of such profiles.
You can only see those profiles of instagram which are popular, set to public, and NOT private.
Conclusion
In this post, we talked:
- How to use wayback machine instagram to see past profiles activities?
- What we can see on wayback machine?
- Is wayback machine legal or illegal to use?
- And, what to do if the wayback machine isn’t working?
We discussed everything in detailed and I hoep you’ll like the discussion. Let us know in the comment section.
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