Accepted Media

It's important to recognize that not everything submitted will be added to the archive. Some things are so common (e.g. Windows 95 ISOs) that they aren't worth including. The archive is meant to be a collection of uncommon media related to Microsoft. However, we also realize even that explanation has some uncertainty to it. We've provided a table below outlining the things we recommend and don't recommend submitting.

Media Type Accepted Notes Example(s)
Retail versions of unsupported products without a supported equivalent Yes   Windows Live Essentials 2009
Beta versions of unsupported products Yes    
Developer media (MSDN, SDK, etc) Yes   Xbox SDK
Digital (downloadable) applications, games and operating systems Yes    
Digital Microsoft MSDN, Technet and VLSC software Yes    
Original photo, artwork and clipart collection media Yes    
Original font collection media Yes    
Original press kit and promotional media Yes    
Original demo/trial/evaluation software Yes* This may depends on what you're submitting.  
Magazines and book media Yes* Please only submit related pages and not the whole book (unless the book is Microsoft-related as a whole).  
Retail versions of unsupported products with supported equivalents Probably* This depends on how recent the product is. The DirectX 2.0a installer is more likely to be accepted than the DirectX 11 installer, since it's harder to find.
OEM OS media Unlikely That OEM OS media better have something rare on there, cause i'm not hosting 2.5 TB of Dell touchpad drivers.  Gateway Windows Vista Express Installation ISO
Harddrive or partition dumps Unlikely You should probably dump any rare software included on it's own instead of the whole drive.  
Commomly archived software No A general rule of thumb for determining whether something is too common to bother archiving is whether or not you can find multiple archive.org links on the first page of Google. Pretty much any Windows ISO, Office 2007, etc.
Any third party copies of original media No This is the Unofficial Microsoft Archive, not the Unofficial DiLshad Sys Archive Windows 9 Pro by DiLshad Sys
Source code of any kind No Absolutely not Leaked Windows NT 4.0 source code
Retail versions of currently supported products No   Windows 11, Office 365, Copilot
Beta versions of currently supported products No   Windows 11 betas
Invalid or improper dumps No    
Pre-installed virtual machines No