Wholeheartedly agree. It's sad to slowly see the bitrot in my own bookmarks, trying to pull up important resources or media from only a few years ago only to hit a 404 or domain placeholder. And many times there is nothing on Archive.org or similar.

That ArchiveWeb extension looks excellent for custom captures. Picking the pages and elements you want during capture is a great feature.

For quicker one-offs, SingleFile gives you a single HTML with all the media of a page: https://www.getsinglefile.com

If you're making archiving a more involved part of your workflow, I highly recommend ArchiveBox. It can save pretty much every type of file from everywhere, in almost every format you can imagine, while building a searchable index of the archives. Been using it successfully for many years: https://archivebox.io

In 5 years, cloud LLMs may have largely replaced the open Internet as a source of information, with centralized control and ability to rewrite the past.

Please, please buy books and keep them in good condition, and please archive websites with important information (assuming it's legal in your jurisdiction). There are still plenty of excellent sites and blogs around from the 2000s and even earlier, but they won't be there forever. Ironically, coding agents have made archival much easier -- I've always found problems with using pre-written tools, but Claude or Qwen make it trivial to download, test, and archive sites on your local.

So, this is a fine idea and all, but aren't the "piss off AI bot" mitigations going to throw a wrench into folks wanting to back up a website?

I guess the web plugins could ideally get around it, but what about the CLI and app solutions?

I know yt-dlp has gone to great lengths to work this problem.

I learned this the hard way by getting too casual with Angelfire keeping an old website running for 20 years after I stopped updating it.

It had lots of photos that I hand-scanned from printed film, back in the day when it took a good bit of time to scan photos manually.

The site was a running joke, where I would open it to show people that it still existed... until it didn't, and I couldn't find my backup of all of the photos. The archive sites have the 'bones' of the website, but not the photos. It was easily avoidable, which is why it is painful.

I scrape daily. YouTube, archive,org (sadly getting harder and harder since you have to "checkout" books), worldradiohistory.com…

(Now if hard drives had not become so damn expensive—it's getting harder to be a digital hoarder like myself.)

I recently spent a few days trying to figure out and discover my old websites and things from the early 2000s on the web archive. I hadn't realised my memory had gone quite so bad, but it was revitalising to find some of what I'd forgotten. So much of what I do remember is long dead and missing, sadly.

I thought it might be rose-tinted glasses, thinking that the earlier internet was better, but spending time retracing my teenage steps made me even more certain that it was indeed better. So many derpy little websites made by nerds, so many fun games and websites that weren't preying on vulnerable people, and everything spread out across many places - not centralised in the hands of large corporations. I've been using LLMs to have fun recreating concepts from that time, like my own forum software, as some sort of anti-progress. It's been fun.

Bonus suggestion: get that internet archive extension for your browser that automatically sends every page you visit to the IA (if you're ok with the privacy side).

You don't have to worry about having your copy easily accessible, and as a bonus it's also available for everyone else in the world.

I've backed up lots of CS courses, you know those old html websites written by the professors by hand. `wget -mkpnp` works very well for those. Even years after finishing uni, I've used those websites for studying for interviews. Too bad most of them are now gone.

one of the great tragedies of my life was when https://buthowdoitknow.com/ went offline, taking the visual emulator with it

i managed to reconstruct (and then improve) it with an LLM:

https://scott-cpu.cs.montana.edu/

This is why I started using Obsidian Web Clipper. There is SOME work to learn it and set it up, but the small amount of upfront work will pay for years to come. And the folder itself is backed by Dropbox, so I don't have to worry about losing it all forever.

I did actually. I took a whole day to go to each of my individual saved bookmarks and save the articles as pdf using edge reader mode, sometimes hunting down articles on the way back machine

the last source of truth are forums.. but not reddit... if it has a CEO it will rot and enshitify.

I'm talking about forums... the bmw forum for your old car... the motorcycle forum for the enthusiast of the SV650... those places are full of anecdotes, people talking, lending a hand to another person... being humans and care...

Which is what social media is/should/was about, is what internet is about before the enshitification happened... I would vote to have this ID associated to you via check of your local goverment issued id and ONLY UPPON VERIFICATION of you being using that you can log and read and use those websites without tracking you (Yes 10,000 ifs where this is secure, handled in a confidential matter, the whole tech is not to track that you are doing something... but that a human is behind that, no api, no robot, no adds, no nothing... just the old school forum where you can go, talk, submit a photo... where someone who wanted to spend time to write something did it, SO WE CAN ENSURE TWO THINGS, A HUMAN IS THERE, AND NO FVK!NG CEO WILL ENSHITIFY IT, no to track people, but to know that a person is interacting there)

But because "empathy is the weakness" and shareholder value...

I tend to save things I read as PDFs because it feels the most robust archival formal for the future.

Over the summer, I had the urge to do this with a few favorite blogs. wget did the trick for static content

Another great writeup about backing up websites: https://gwern.net/archiving

Thanks for the guide ,I never new about this

Yes, and with AI you can even back up the logic behind a website (the back-end), and even generate fake but plausible data to fill it if crawling is too much work.

There are far better tools that are not built by this person’s company. Dig around and you’ll find an incredible array. Not everything has to be a sales pitch.

Same goes for youtube vids

Have a look at Hister [1], a 'personal web history search engine' which by way of extensions for browsers captures your web history and stores actual page content on your own instance where it can be browsed and searched. It does not store images so if that's what you're mostly interested in it won't work for you. For text is works quite well, maybe sometimes too well since it also stores ephemeral things like HN comment pages unless you tell it not to.

[1] https://github.com/asciimoo/hister/

I had a graphing calculator website that had 250K monthly active users, from the logs it seemed mostly schools' math classes in Latin America. It was running on a single AWS EC2 Classic.

Ironically, when I started working for AWS, I always felt threatened with sticks and never had space to maintain my own projects. When they deprecated EC2 Classic, my site went down. I didn't get time or mental space to migrate it.

Cest la vie I guess.

I did this for a while. I went so far as to built a highly advanced web crawler webapp that was better than the Internet Archive in a lot of ways.

But the modern web has made this unreasonable. Every webpage is 99% junk (CSS, JS, HTML structure, tracking pixels, UI images, navigation links, cryptominers (I joke)) and 1% content. You need a smart AI system to pick out the good parts, otherwise you'll quickly find yourself schlepping hundreds of gigs of junk to just preserve your favorite websites.

The better idea is: if you love information, back it up. Collect the knowledge from the website, not the website. And then preserve it. Create a free ebook. Or sell it on Amazon kindle. That'll last a lot longer than the website will, and any HTML backup of the site you could possibly make.

Ages ago (like 2001 or so?) I started building something to automatically archive everything I browse. I used tcpflow (https://www.circlemud.org/jelson/software/tcpflow/). I've seen a fair bit of varions of this idea over the years

Then SSL/TLS started getting widespread and I lost focus. Nowadays, I guess you would build it as an extension in the browser.

i'm saddened that http://macsecret.com/ along with /files directory seems to have all be been lost. I has waiting on some storage for the NAS to archive it and it went away before I could back it up.

https://hister.org/ is a neat website indexing and archival tool.

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