If you love a website, back it up
21 points by calvin
21 points by calvin
I have a habit of saving a webpage I like in Zotero. Zotero's web extension uses SingleFile to capture the true copy of the webpage as it appears. It feels strangely comforting to know that it is going to stay with me as long as I want it without worrying about link rots.
Karakeep is great, use it daily
I tried the simplest option and Ctrl+S on Firefox let me save the whole page and also included all the ancillary files (PNG, CSS) in a folder alongside the HTML document. Opening the saved page back up with internet disabled gave me the exact same page. Kudos to the Firefox team, I had figured that it would only store the bare html file and all the CSS and images would be busted.
Here on lobste it was somewhat worse as the CSS got screwy and rendered the page as white.
That sounds useful. I didn't know Firefox did that.
I've used an extension called SingleFile to save snapshots of pages. It packs the page and all of its assets into a single—though quite large—HTML file which I find convenient.
I save interesting pages as PDF. When the CSS has no proper print setup then I save the Read View in Firefox. Sometimes you get very pleasent PDF that way.
I have some cronjobs pushing things to Archive.org and hope they stay with us.
Otherwise prefer SingleFile over PDF any day.
I would be happy to see a project one day that gives me the ability to pitch in compute/hosting for websites for close friends and also for internet strangers if I choose to. Bitrot is really sad to me, and I want the same for me when I'm gone.
Personal backups and centralized ones like Web Archive are at opposite ends of the spectrum, and as far as I can tell, the middle is empty. DNS is a huge hurdle to overcome and I don't know what a good solution would look like.