HTTrack is a free-to-use website copier. Its web site provides the following description: “It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site’s relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the “mirrored” website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online.”
I downloaded and installed HTTrack very quickly and without any difficulty, then I set about configuring the tool to mirror pwofc.com. This involved simply specifying a project name, the name of the web site to be copied, and a destination folder. The Options were more complicated and, for the most part, I just left the default settings before pressing ‘Finish’ on the final screen. There was an immediate glitch when I discovered that I had not provided the full web address (I’d specified pwofc.com instead of http://www.pwofc.com/ofc/); but having made that change, I pressed ‘Finish’ again and HTTrack got on with its mirroring. Some 2 hours 23 minutes and 48 seconds later, HTTrack completed the job, having scanned 1827 links and having copied 1538 files with a total file size of 212 Mb.
The mirroring had produced seven components: two folders (hts-cache and www.pwofc.com) and 5 files (index, external, hts-log, backblue and fade). The hts-cache folder is generated by HTTrack to enable future updates to the mirrored web site; the external file is a template page for displaying external links which have not been copied; backblue and fade are small gif images used in such templates; and the log file records what happened in the mirroring session. The remaining wwwpwofc.com folder and index file contain the actual contents of the mirror.
On double clicking the Index file, the pwofc.com home page sprang to life in my browser looking exactly the same as it does when I access it over the net. As I navigated around the site the internal links all seemed to work and all the pictures were in place, though the search facility didn’t work. External links produced a standard HTTrack page headed by “Oops!… This page has not been retrieved by HTTrack Website Copier. Clic to the link below to go to the online location!” – and indeed clicking the link did take me to the correct location (I believe it is possible to specify that external links can also be copied by setting the ‘Limit’ option ‘maximum external depth’ to one, but my subsequent attempt to do so ended with errors after just two minutes; I abandoned the attempt). The only other noticeable difference was the speed with which one could navigate around the pages – it was just about instantaneous. From this cursory examination I was satisfied that the mirror had accurately captured most, if not all, of the website.
An inspection of the log file, however, identified that there had been one error – “Method Not Allowed (405) at link www.pwofc.com/ofc/xmlrpc.php (from www.pwofc.com/ofc/)”. According to the net, a PHP file ‘is a webpage that contains PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) code. … The PHP code within the webpage is processed (parsed) by a PHP engine on the web server, which dynamically generates HTML’. Interestingly, I wasn’t aware of having any content with such characteristics, but, on closer inspection of the files in my hosting folder, I found I had lots of them – probably hundreds of them. I tried to figure out what the error file related to but had no clue other than its rather striking creation date – 23/12/2016 at 00:00:00 – the same date as several of the other PHP files. I had not created any blog entries on that day, so my investigation ground to a halt. I don’t have the knowledge to explore this, and I’m not prepared to spend the time to find out. My guess is that the PHP files do the work of translating the base content stored in the SQL database into the structured web pages that appear on the screen. I’m just glad that there was only one error – and that its occurrence isn’t obviously noticeable in the locally produced web pages.
The log file also reported 574 warning which came in the form of 287 pairs. A typical example pair is shown below:
19:31:13 Warning: Moved Permanently for www.pwofc.com/ofc/?p=987 19:31:13 Warning: File has moved from www.pwofc.com/ofc/?p=987 to http://www.pwofc.com/ofc/2017/06/29/an-ofc-model/
I tried to find a Help list of all the Warning and Error messages in the HTTrack documentation but it seems that such a list doesn’t exist. Instead there is a Help forum which has several entries relating to such warning messages – but none that I could relate to the occurrences in my log. As far as I can see, all of the pages mentioned in the warnings (in the above instance the title of the page is ‘an-OFC-Model’), have been copied successfully so I decided that it wasn’t worth spending any further time on it.
All in all, I judge my use of HTTrack to have been a success. It has delivered me a backup of my (relatively simple) site which I can actually see and navigate around, and which can be easily zipped up into a single file and stored.