Your favorite website could vanish any day: here is how to save it yourself

The author of the blog The Future Is Now opens with a small tragedy. She keeps a set of old websites that have stayed unchanged for years, sometimes decades, and checks in on them now and then, the way you might look in on an old friend. One of them, teapuppies.com, was a fan site for the anime and toy line Ochaken: cute cartoon dogs with tea leaves for ears, each named after a kind of tea. The site had been online since 2004 and had barely changed since 2005. A few weeks ago she found it gone, with the domain now serving online gambling ads.

The irony is that she works in web archiving. She should have known the site would eventually disappear, and she had every tool needed to save it. She didn't. So now she is urging readers not to repeat her mistake.

Anyone can archive

Many people, she says, assume web archiving is a job for big organizations like the Internet Archive, and that all they can do is wait and hope a page gets saved. That is a misconception. Her core message: if you love a site, a post or a piece of information, back it up yourself.

All the tools she covers use the standard WARC and WACZ formats. WARC records complete requests and responses, headers included, which makes it possible to archive even complex sites with client-side JavaScript. WACZ packages WARC files together with metadata. She openly discloses that the tools come from the company she works for, but notes that most are free and that she considers them the best options for personal archiving.

Three ways to do it

• The ArchiveWeb.page extension for Chrome is the easiest option. Click "Start Archiving," browse the pages you want, click any interactive elements so their data loads, then click "Stop Archiving." It works for a single page, a whole site, or a social media post or profile.
• The standalone archiveweb.page app works the same way but has its own built-in browser. It suits those without Chrome or who would rather not install an extension.
• Browsertrix is a web crawler for larger sites that would be tedious to browse by hand. It follows links on its own, and you can narrow its scope to a single section or to one page plus whatever it links to. It is the only paid tool on the list: after a seven-day trial, you pay per use. It is open source, though, so technically inclined users can run their own copy.

Viewing and keeping archives

An archived site can be replayed in the browser just like a live one, a kind of personal Wayback Machine. You can share the WARC/WACZ file with others, who can open it in ArchiveWeb.page or on the ReplayWeb.page website. The open-source embeddable ReplayWeb.page viewer lets you put an archive straight into a blog post, with no server-side app required. She does exactly that in the post itself, embedding a full site archive made with Browsertrix on near-default settings.

Because an archive fits into a single WACZ file, it is easy to keep safe. She recommends handing copies to friends, since lots of copies keep stuff safe. She hopes for a world full of thousands of small archives kept by people and community groups preserving what matters to them, and offers to help anyone unsure where to start.

Source: Lobsters