I guessed that it was not necessarily as simple as some might believe. His concern seemed to be that HTTrack would not mirror all of the programming that would underlie a blog, and therefore some links (e.g., Search) would not function or might yield undesirable results if clicked on in the HTTrack mirror. To the extent applicable, this could include Search and other widgets, plugins, comments, and metatags, as well as code minification. On the other extreme, Noumaan Yaqoob, evidently working with blogs, said that I would have to disable all dynamic features of my blog. I saw comments by others who had done exactly that, with acceptable results. On one extreme, eHow said that, to back up a Blogger blog (presumably not very different from a WordPress blog) using HTTrack, you just basically point and shoot. This led to a bemusing spectrum of suggestions. Given my particular interest in using HTTrack to back up my blogs, especially but not only those in WordPress, I also ran a search for advice. I ran HTTrack while consulting its documentation page. I put the entire contents of the portable version into my customized Start Menu, not located on drive C, so that I could back it up, share it with other computers, and preserve it for years, regardless of Windows reinstallations. The version I downloaded was called httrack_圆4-noinst-3.47.27.zip. So I opted for the 64-bit portable version. I hoped to preserve my settings, once developed, over a long period of time, and anyway I preferred not to have to reinstall a boatload of programs whenever I installed Windows. I assumed the non-installer version was what others would call the portable version. I saw that there were downloads for both 32- and 64-bit systems, with and without installers. (Once backed up, it was not necessary to re-download the full website HTTrack would just copy the pages that had changed.) I hadn’t done a careful job of exploring and understanding those settings in the first place, nor had I checked what was actually getting downloaded, so it seemed that I might as well sit down at this point and look into it more thoroughly. Most recently, however, I had somehow lost the settings that I had used to make a successful backup of my blogs. At its best, I had been very happy with it. It could also be useful for capturing and preserving the state of a website as of a certain date. This could be handy in case of hardware difficulties or lack of an Internet connection. I would have to update it to keep it current, but otherwise I could browse the contents of the downloaded website without going online. So if, while browsing the mirror, I clicked on a link that said About Ray Woodcock, I would be taken to a mirror image of the online page that discusses me - but that mirror would be stored on my computer, and I could take it with me on my laptop or on a USB drive or CD. Once that page was open, its links would function like links online, except that they would not lead to online pages: they would lead to downloaded pages contained in the mirror. Double-clicking on an HTML file in the mirror would open it in one’s default browser, which in my case was Firefox. The downloaded copy (sometimes referred to here as the “mirror”) of the website would consist of one or more HTML files, just like the website from which it was copied. ![]() Contrary to the program’s name, one would probably not use HTTrack to browse that downloaded copy. When it worked as intended, HTTrack would produce a copy, on one’s hard disk or elsewhere, of an entire website, or of a designated portion thereof. WinHTTrack was the Windows version of HTTrack Website Copier, which described itself as a free offline browser. Another post provides a more recent statement of where those alternatives took me. In a word, I learned a fair amount about HTTrack, and on that basis I decided to try alternatives. I decided to devote a bit of time to an effort to learn how to use it properly. ![]() I did not fully understand its settings, but I did think it could be useful for me. ![]() ![]() A look at ways of backing up and copying blogs and websites led to several tools and techniques.
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