Open source · MIT

Every link you cite, archived before it rots.

An Obsidian plugin that sends the external links in a note — or your whole vault — to the Wayback Machine and rewrites them to durable snapshot URLs.

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❯ wayback linker / citations.md
# Citations
Check out this source:
[Original Link](https://example.com/paper)
Fresh capture saved · Save Page Now
[Original Link](https://web.archive.org/web/2026…/example.com/paper)
Progress · 2/4
Freshhttps://example.com/paper
Freshhttps://a.io/study
Workinghttps://b.org/article
Pendinghttps://c.net/dataset
Wayback 2/4 · waiting for capture

Capabilities

End link rot permanently.

Wayback Linker talks directly to the Internet Archive so the sources in your notes never disappear — and never touches a link unless the capture succeeded.

Fresh captures, verified

Requests a new snapshot from Save Page Now and checks the returned timestamp is actually fresh — never a stale capture served from cache.

Vault-wide scan

Scans every Markdown note, confirms link, note, and unique-URL counts with you first, archives each URL once, and replaces across the vault.

Smart replacement

Notes are re-read and re-parsed after captures finish, so edits made mid-run never cause a stale or misplaced replacement.

Snapshot fallback

If a fresh capture fails or times out, optionally fall back to the most recent existing snapshot from the availability and CDX APIs.

Ignored domains

Skip hosts like amazon.com everywhere — notes, vault scans, and right-click archiving — with subdomains matched automatically.

Secure credentials

Internet Archive S3 keys live in Obsidian's native keychain — only the entry names are ever written to plugin data.

Workflow

One command. Zero dead links.

1

Trigger the command

Click the ribbon button, run Archive active note links, start a confirmed vault-wide pass — or right-click a single URL in the editor.

2

Background capture

Each unique URL is sent to Save Page Now with polite pacing, throttle-aware retries, and a live progress window you can cancel at any time.

3

Inline replacement

Once a snapshot is verified fresh, the original URL is rewritten in place to the permanent web.archive.org snapshot URL.

In action

Watch every capture as it lands.

Wayback Linker progress window archiving URLs

Get started

Install in under a minute.

Recommended

Community plugins

  1. Open Settings → Community plugins → Browse.
  2. Search for Wayback Linker.
  3. Click Install, then Enable.

BRAT

  1. Install the BRAT plugin.
  2. Choose Add beta plugin.
  3. Enter Real-Fruit-Snacks/wayback-linker.
  4. Enable Wayback Linker.

Manual

  1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release.
  2. Place them in .obsidian/plugins/wayback-linker/.
  3. Enable Wayback Linker in Community plugins.