There are several ways to save a website and they largely depend on your needs. If you only want to save textual information you could be finished by a simple copy and paste job. If you want to preserve the links you need to save it as html. Most browsers have the option to save a website locally but what if you need more than one page or would like the information of the links as well ?
You could open every website and save it. This has some disadvantages. First, there is no link structure between the saved pages. If you want to open page 1 you have to find the index file for page 1 which is different from all other pages. Its great for single pages but not great for entire websites or networks.
Before i start with the solution I´d like to point out reasons why someone would like to save a website to a local drive:
1. Fear that the site will be deleted. (Maybe its hosted @ geocities or a similar site, everyone knows that sites tend to come and go pretty fast on free webhosts)
2. For offline browsing. Maybe you don´t have a flatrate and have to pay for the minutes you are online. It could also be that you would like to transfer the website to a pc that has no internet connection. This includes the case that you want to install a new os, e.g. linux, and have difficulties configuring the internet connection. You could save tutorial sites on your pc before you make the change.
3. You are a collector. This could include everything, most of the time it will be images though.
The tool:
We will be using the freeware tool Httrack which is available for windows, mac os x and linux personal computers. Download it from the official website httrack.com
Every website that you save to your local drive is stored in a project file. The first step after you´ve started httrack is to create a new project by clicking NEXT.
Add some basic information about the project, name and category and the path where you want to save it. I suggest a drive with enough space for all of the files of the website. Please note that you can´t create a new directory in the program itself.
This is the most important options screen for your project. You select an action and add urls to perform this action. If you want to download an entire website select Download web site(s) and add urls to the web address field.
If you only want to download certain filetypes select Get seperated files. You specify the filetypes by clicking on set options and selecting scan rules.
You can add urls by simply typing one in the textfield or by clicking add url. Clicking add url allows you to enter a website you want to download and add login information for that website. Httrack allows you to capture urls as well by using a proxy.
Set Options leads to a projects options page. You can specify lots of information here. Depth of website scan, follow external links, include / exclude files and directories and much more.
The default settings will download all internal websites and refuse to download external websites.
That means if you only want to download a website try the default settings and take a look at the result. Php files will be saved as html.
Links:
Command line guide
Faq
Httrack Forum
Options explained
[tags]save, websites, download, archive, rip, url, cache, mirror, offline, browsing[/tags]
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4 Responses to “How to save websites to your hard drive”
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[...] How to save websites to your hard drive There are several ways to save a website and they largely depend on your needs. If you only want to save textual information you could be finished by a simple copy and paste job. If you want to preserve the links you need to save it as html. Most browsers (tags: howto tutorial web backup tutorials) [...]
i use scrapbook extension for firefox.
also of note is slogger which mirrors yuor cache and also has some other intresting options. its a kind of furl.net for your local drive.
I had scrapbook installed but did not like it that much, did not test it in depth though. Been using Httrack for ages and have not found a better program to download entire websites.
There is a firefox extension for it as well: http://spiderzilla.mozdev.org/
Have not heard of slogger, while see if i can find any information about it. Maybe you could post a link ?
Great program for those who do not use Firefox!