The Open Source Tool That Has Preserved 150,000 Pieces of Online Evidence

Bellingcat announces a major update to its Auto Archiver, a tool for preserving online content at scale, adding a web interface, detailed documentation, a modular architecture (Feeder, Extractor, Enricher, Formatter, Storage, Database), API, configuration editor, and features such as chain of custody, perceptual hashing for deduplication, and anti-bot/captcha evasion via proxies. The release emphasizes easier setup, team collaboration (e.g., Google Sheets integration, ATLOS), reliable storage (local, S3, Google Drive), extensibility for developers, and guidance on when to use alternative archiving tools, while inviting contributions, feedback, and newsroom adoption.