Site Archiving

Congratulations! Your CMS site is now Live. You're now probably wondering what will happen with your old Cascade site. Here we explain a little more about the process involved in decommissioning your Cascade site

Aim

As part of the migration to a CMS website, we wish to provide organisations with a simple process to archive their old Cascade website content prior to decommissioning.

Process
  • Once your CMS site is Live, your new site and Cascade sites will run in parallel for up to 4 months. You'll be given a date for when your Cascade site will be closed so you have time to move over any further content.
  • At the end of these 4 months (or sooner if requested) your Cascade site will be archived. We will make sure you can access the site archive before proceeding with the next step.
  • Your Cascade site will now be taken offline. However, you will still have admin access to the backend of Cascade for a further 2 months.
  • Once these 2 months are up, all admin access will be removed from Cascade. You will no longer have any access to your Cascade site other than the site archive.
  • To view the copy of your site Archive go to UK Web Archive and enter your web address. 
Objectives
  • It can archive websites based on different domain names and formats – fully qualified, subfolders, and URL parameters.
  • The archive is a website – it is structured, you can navigate it and the features work, i.e. links, documents, images, css, JavaScript.
  • Welsh and English are archived as separate sites.

It is acknowledged that some features will not work such as forms that are used for searching, feedback etc 

Background

Website content is regularly indexed by numerous web crawlers - search engines, email harvesters, etc. This crawled content can be found in search engines however the content is not structured.  For archiving purposes, NHS Wales requires the content to be available in a structured manner, i.e. a complete snapshot of the website at a given point in time.

A quick review of potential options identified the National Library of Wales undertakes such audits on a periodic basis of NHS Wales websites.  This is to meet their legal obligation to archive any work published online “if it is made available to the public from a website with a domain name which relates to the United Kingdom or to a place within the United Kingdom”.