Back up your website with HTTrack
Your website is reliably hosted on a global infrastructure with automated backup and monitoring system. You may, however, need to download a copy of it on your local computer every now and then - for example, before making major content or design revisions. An easy and free tool that allows to a complete download of your website for archival purposes is HTTrack.
Please note - in practice site backups made with HTTrack do not copy the graphics from Page Images, Banners, Image Galleries and, in some cases, layout elements and forms. In other words, you can't just run Httrack and then put your site up easily onto a FTP server without making changes in the code. Use at your own risk. No support is provided for use of this program.
Your site must be published and linked to a domain name for it to work. You cannot back-up a site that is at your temporary earthgrid.com/<username> address. This program will only run on a PC and is intended to be an archival backup, not a replacement for the actual site. Our support staff can do a full
backup conversion of your site ready for a FTP server as a paid service.
Please contact us for details.
Follow these steps to run it and have your site downloaded.
1. After you have downloaded HTTrack installation file, click it twice to setup the software on your computer. When the setup is complete, click Next to start downloading your site.
2. Choose your project name and define your destination folder (the folder where the copy of the site will get downloaded). Click Next.
3. Select the default Action: Download web site(s) and type your website URL in the Web Addresses (URL) field below. Click Next. If you receive errors when downloading your site with the default settings consult the HTTrack FAQ Page.
4. Leave all settings in the next step as loaded by default and click Finish:
5. You can view the progress of your download (usually takes several minutes).
When the downloaded copy of your site is complete, you may:
-
Check the error log file, which could contain useful information if errors have occurred. Find out more about possible errors, how they may occur, and how to troubleshoot at the HTTrack FAQ Page.
- Browse the copy of the website
- Click the Finish button to exit HTTrack.
Your website will now be downloaded as a folder with a number of sub-folders to the location specified in step 2. You may browse your site offline by opening the folder titled www.yourdomain.com and selecting from the browser files within.
Please note - even though this is a backup of your site - the graphics in your banners, page images, slideshows and image galleries are still 'on the cloud' and will vanish if you cease your hosting account. In order to make a ready to FTP version of your site to archive to your own FTP server will require additional work. Our support staff can do a full backup conversion of your site ready for a FTP server as a paid service. Please contact us for details.
