Consider two people. One has no note of any awazon market address at all. The other has a careful note written eight months ago and has not looked at it since. The first person knows they have a problem. The second one does not, and will find out at the point where the difference costs the most.
That is the whole subject of this page. An expired item and a good item are physically identical. The file opens. The paper is legible. The characters are all there. Nothing about the object announces that the world moved on.
Three ways a held thing stops being true
It helps to separate the failures, because they need different handling.
| What happened | What it looks like when you pick the thing up | What actually saves you |
|---|---|---|
| The thing itself changed | Nothing. Your copy is intact and now describes something that no longer exists. | A date on your copy, and a habit of refetching from more than one place. |
| Your copy drifted | Also nothing. A character got mangled in a paste, or you wrote from memory once. | A second copy made at a different time, kept somewhere else, and compared occasionally. |
| The context changed | The thing is right and no longer fits. A rate, a fee, a delivery window. | Treating it as a snapshot from the start and writing the moment beside it. |
The middle row is the meanest. A copy that drifted looks exactly as authoritative as one that did not, and if it is the only copy you own you have no way to tell. That is why several entries here ask for a second copy made separately rather than a duplicate made by copying the first one.
What a date buys you
Every stale item on this site is fixable with two extra words written beside it: a month and a year. Not because the date proves the thing is good. It does not. A date proves only when you last had a reason to believe it.
What the date really does is convert an unanswerable question into an easy one. Instead of asking whether your copy of an awazon onion link is still the right one, which you cannot answer from your chair, you ask how old your copy is. That you can answer instantly, and it tells you whether to lean on the thing or go and refresh it first.
How often is often enough
There is no correct interval and anyone quoting one is guessing. What works is tying the refresh to something you already do rather than to a calendar you will ignore. Before a visit, look at the age of the things the visit depends on. If any of them predates the last time you actually used the market, refresh those first and treat the visit as starting then.
The items that rot fastest are the ones tied to a moving external fact. A note of the rate you paid at is stale within the hour and that is fine, because you only need it to describe a moment. A file of published addresses rots slowly and invisibly, which makes it far more dangerous. A list of delivery windows is designed to expire, one line at a time, and the expiry is the useful part.
The things that genuinely keep
Not everything rots, and it would be tiring to treat it as if it did. A key pair you generated is as good in a year as it is today, provided you can still reach the secret half and still remember what protects it. A username you used nowhere else stays useful for as long as you keep that promise. A wallet you control is fine until you lose the material that controls it, which is a different failure with a different fix.
For those, the only maintenance worth doing is confirming that you can still reach the thing. Open the file. Read the paper. Unlock the key once. People discover a forgotten passphrase at the moment they need the key, and that is a self inflicted wound with a very cheap cure.
A short honest limit
None of this makes anything safe, and this page is not claiming that a well dated inventory protects you from a bad outcome. It protects you from one specific and very common outcome, which is being stopped by something you thought you had already dealt with. That is a narrow promise and it is the only one this site is willing to make.
Questions that come up
How do I know whether my copy of an address is still right?
From your chair, you do not. What you can do is compare your copy against places you did not get it from, and note the day you did that. This site publishes addresses and tests nothing, so treat it as one place among several rather than as an answer.
If everything rots, why write anything down at all?
Because the alternative is memory, which rots faster and lies more convincingly. A written thing with a date can be judged and replaced. A remembered thing feels equally solid whether it is right or wrong.
What should I refresh first after a long gap?
The things that other things depend on. An address file and a fingerprint you collected yourself sit underneath almost everything else, so refresh those before you start caring about the rest.