Preservation of information about Apple's devices and software is the mission of The Apple Wiki. That said, there are both technical (storage and bandwidth) and legal (copyright) limits to what The Apple Wiki can preserve, so we still find ourselves to be dependent on Apple's willingness to keep old information online. While Apple have done a surprisingly good job of preserving historic documents and downloads, some of it is starting to disappear.
Deleted content
The following content has been deleted by Apple, or otherwise moved to a location that has not yet been found. This is not intended to be a comprehensive list, but if you find any additional deleted content of historic interest, please add it below.
- An inconsistent range of firmware releases that Apple may have deemed no longer necessary to continue hosting
- An inconsistent range of macOS software updates
- Legacy releases of software such as iTunes and Xcode
- Certain Apple Support articles, such as release notes for macOS releases
- Old Apple Events and WWDC sessions, mostly prior to 2014
What The Apple Wiki is doing
The Apple Wiki makes use of the Internet Archive Bot, originally developed for Wikipedia and other wikis run by the Wikimedia Foundation, to aid in the preservation mission. The bot regularly checks all external links across the entire wiki, ensuring they continue to be active. Should a link be found to no longer respond for a few days in a row, the bot will search the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to find a suitable archived copy, and insert a link to the archive alongside the dead link. If no archive appears to exist, it will mark the link as dead. These templates will categorise the page into Category:Webarchive template wayback links or Category:All articles with dead external links respectively. The bot additionally ensures links previously unknown to the Wayback Machine are submitted to their system to be archived (with some exceptions).
How you can help
- Check the list of articles with dead links, and search through the wikitext for
{{dead link}}tags. Find suitable replacements for these links that are currently live, or archives on web.archive.org, and remove{{dead link}}. - If you click a link and find that it leads to a 404 Not Found, or redirects somewhere other than the intended document, tag it by adding
{{dead link}}immediately after it, so the bot becomes aware that it is dead and needs replacing. - If you click an "Archived by the Wayback Machine" link and find that it doesn't lead to the intended document, browse the timeline of backups at the top of the screen to find a more suitable version. Then, edit the page to replace the web.archive.org link with the one you found.
- Submit links for archival by the Wayback Machine early and often, so that in future we might be able to fall back on your thoughtful thinking to preserve that valuable information.
Review Wikipedia's help article "Using the Wayback Machine" to learn more about how to discover content on the Wayback Machine.
If you need to intentionally preserve a dead link as-is, you may tag it as such by appending {{cbignore}} immediately after it. This will prevent the bot from adding any additional tags to the link.
Wayback Machine browser extension
You might also be interested in installing the Wayback Machine extension for your browser. It can be used to quickly view archives of the current website or a link on it, and to submit links for archival.