Tips and tricks for finding freebies

This page is a collection of useful techniques that some of the wiki's contributors use to find free resources.

Harvesting free resources from the Wayback Machine
Occasionally, you'll have the URL of a site where a free resource used to be, but the site isn't on the "live" web any more. You know about the Wayback Machine, but it didn't get a complete copy of the website, so you can't find the download page again.

However, there's a chance that a copy of the freebie might be saved even if the page wasn't.

As an example, we're going to look for "Whisper", a one-piece wardrobe item for Aiko 3 that used to be available at free.daz3d.com


 * 1) Go to the Wayback Machine, type in the host part of the URL of the page, then type in a slash and some random letters instead of the path - for example, free.daz3d.com/something - then click on the "Browse History" button
 * 2) You'll get an error message:
 * 3) The URL in the error message is a link. Click on that link, and you'll get a list of everything archive.org has for the site - in this case, "288 URLs have been captured for this domain".
 * 4) There's a filter box below that header line where you can type in common file-format suffixes so that you don't need to look through the entire list. For the example, type in "whisper"
 * 5) Follow the links you get - either you'll be brought to the freebie immediately, or you'll be sent to the usual Wayback Machine page that you get when they have multiple copies of a file.

This isn't a foolproof method - sometimes, the Wayback Machine saves a "file not found" message or a "login to continue" screen instead of the free resource. It is better than nothing, though.