Website archiving is becoming more important for digital businesses today. One reason for this is the exponential growth of content upload on websites and the need to maintain its longevity. Another reason is the prevalent information regulations that require enterprises to keep time-stamped records of their online activities.
You can use various tools to archive web assets such as the Wayback Machine, Google Keep, Bear, Ever-Note, and Internet Archive. Knowing to use these tools is essential to preserve your website assets for future reference.
Read more to understand what website archiving software is and how to use it.
What is Website Archiving Software?
A website archiving software is an application that lets you download your current version of your website and preserve it digitally on the internet or your hard drive. Online archive tools like Wayback Machine allow you to save either a single webpage or an entire website.
On the other hand, offline archiving software allows you to download an entire website to your computer's hard drive. HTTrack is an example of archive software that downloads a website to a computer.
How to use an Online Archiving Tool
You can use various online tools to archive your website, such as Internet Archives, Mirror Web, Rhizome, Warcreate, Pagefreezer, among others.
To archive using these online tools, you simply visit their website and enter the web address you wish to archive. You then select the option to save the website, which initiates a crawler to scan the website.
Once the crawler scans the whole website, the archived site's web address appears in the online archive. However, some of these online archiving tools might require verification if you are the owner of the website being archived due to copyright issues.
How to use an Offline Archive Software
As mentioned earlier, an offline archiving tool lets you download your website to your computer’s hard drive. First, you have to download archiving software like HTTrack before beginning the process.
You can download the archive software on various Operating Systems, including Windows, Linux, or IOS, and it is open source. After downloading, you have to install it on your computer, a process taking only 2-3 minutes.
After installation, the software's dashboard has a section where you are required to input the link address of the website to be archived. After entering the link, you click archive, the software prompts a dialogue box, and you select the destination folder, and the process begins.
Some of the software like HTTrack can detect changes during the archiving process and mirror it to the archived website without interrupting the download.
One advantage of using offline archive software is that it archives web forms, Javascript frameworks, videos, images, and password-protected pages. This means that even after archiving the website, you can browse it on your computer as if it were still live on the internet.
The downside of offline archiving software is that they are not entirely accurate in terms of website appearance since some websites are complex.
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