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Google will no longer back up the Internet: Cached webpages are dead. Google Search will no longer make site backups while crawling the web.

Google Search will no longer make site backups while crawling the web.

Google Search's "cached" links have long been an alternative way to load a website that was down or had changed, but now the company is killing them off. That quickly led to Google having a backup of basically the entire Internet, using what was probably an uncountable number of petabytes of data. In 2020, Google switched to mobile-by-default, so for instance, if you visit that cached Ars link from earlier, you get the mobile site.

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