Httrack Backs Up Your Website

There's a command that you can install
under Linux. It is called Httrack. It
will backup your website, or any other
website for that matter.

Httrack is called an offline browser.
It only backs up files that are availabe
to a web browser. For this reason, it is
not a great tool for formal website backups.
It's intended more for casual backups.

In many cases, though, Httrack can
be quite useful. Say, for example,
you've been asked to backup a website
by the copyright owner for that website.
For whatever reason, the copyright owner
is unable to get an FTP password
for the website. This can happen if the password is held by someone who is
hostile to the copyright owner.

In this case, the parts of the website
that require no special programming can
be backed up with Httrack. Many websites
are like this. They have no backend
programming that needs to be backed up.
These websites consist of nothing but
purely informational web pages.

The great advantage of Httrack is
its simplicity. Here's the command
to backup up a simple website:

httrack http://www.mywebsite.com/

It's a wonderful wonderful thing to
have tools that scale to the size of
the problem. If you only want a very
very simple backup, why not use a very
very simple tool.

Of course, Httrack has many command
line options too. With these command
line options, you can extend the
capabilities of Httrack.

Ed Abbott