WARC

WARC (Web ARChive) is an ISO standard file format for storing crawled web content and related metadata (HTTP request/response headers, timestamps, payloads). It succeeded the older ARC format used in early Internet Archive crawls and is widely used with crawlers such as Heritrix.

Role

WARC packages make Web archiving collections portable across institutions and enable replay tools (including the Wayback Machine ecosystem) to reconstruct pages.

See also

• Heritrix
• Internet Archive
• OAIS

Sources

• ISO 28500 WARC specification summaries.
• IIPC practitioner documentation.