Archiving

Introduction

The EU web archive preserves website content for future researchers, historians and the general public. Thanks to the web archive, the information published online by EU institutions remains available, even if the original website has been fully or partially taken down.

What is archived and when

Regular archiving

The websites of the EU institutions, agencies and bodies are archived regularly. The EU web archive only handles websites hosted on the europa.eu domain and subdomains.

Final archiving

If you intend to take a website offline or change it substantially, the website can be archived on an ad hoc basis at the request of the website owner.

In principle, only requests to archive websites in the europa.eu domain and subdomains will be accepted. For websites or pages outside the europa.eu domain, the requester should duly justify that:

• the long-term value of the content justifies its preservation;
• it has significant long-term political, legal, informational, useful, research, social, cultural, historical or artistic value;
• the content aligns with the values, mission and mandate of the EU institutions;
• the EU institutions’ stakeholders and/or the public in general will be affected if this digital heritage is not preserved.

What is not archived

• External websites
• Databases
• Dynamic content
• Social media
• Password-protected sites
• Streaming and downloadable media

We only capture web content that is freely available in the public domain.