Archival 101

Archival is a crucial skill for many operations. Things vanish from the internet all the time, so it helps to have copies of the data that informs your operations for future reference. Local archives are also easier to dig back up as you don't have to search for the same things over and over again, and you can also access them offline.

Not everything can be simply be downloaded with the “Save” command in your browser. Some things require a few steps or specialized tools to download in a way where they are easily accessible. How you archive things depends on the type of content you are archiving. Web pages, images, video, etc, all require different methods and/or tools to save copies of them.

There are several ways to archive web pages, depending on how you want the data to be available:

elaborate here eventually

• https://archive.today
• https://web.archive.org

In some cases, you can use your web browser's Print to PDF function to grab a portable copy of a web page. This has the advantage of stripping out anything nasty (like tracking code) from the page, which you definitely don't want firing off and phoning home from your personal computer.

Print to PDF is not always ideal. Not all web sites render well in print view, and in those cases you will probably want to opt for creating a local mirror of the page. For this you can use Wget. There are several ways you can run wget, but one of the easiest is:

wget -mpEk <target url here>