Earlier today we experienced a web design issue. Playing around with our CSS file led to some breaks on the code, and for several seconds our site was displayed incorrectly. It was a mistake. We should have tried it out on a test site, instead of live. Nevertheless, we were able to get back up and running because of backup files we had made. Of course, a small site like ours is easy to back-up. You can blink and it’s done. But what do you do in the case of a complex site with thousands of pages, media, pictures and the like? How do you keep it updated? What happens if you go down?

So people create a mirror site, which basically means, another domain has duplicate content in case of an issue at the main site. While this is helpful, it is also expensive to run and maintain a secondary website if done manually. The best solution would be a local copy (i.e. on your hard-drive) which you could upload at a moments notice. But isn’t it impractical to copy a whole site? Nope!

We would like to share with you the solution we recommend to all our clients (and it’s free). It’s a website copier. Yes you read that right. The software is called HTTrack. HTTrack is a free and open source website copier (and offline browser) created by Xavier Roche. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License. It allows you to download your web sites from the Internet to a local computer, so you can have it for back-up purposes. You can browse the site offline, with all the content as it was online. In short, it makes an exact replica. Once you have a copy, it can easily be re-run to scan through your site and add the content you’ve updated. You can also pause and restart the backup as you like. You can have it follow your robots.txt or not. It’s basically you own personal desktop webcrawler.

But take note, HTTrack is a extremely powerful tool, and should not be used by a novice. It can cause large amounts of bandwidth to be used if you run it unfiltered. Included within HTTrack are many filters to decide what portions of your site (or documents), will be copied. You should take the time to decide what options you will select and what exactly you need to backup. We recommend also reading the information about abuse and what you should and should not do with this program to avoid any legal or financial issues.

You can download HTTrack here . There is also a manual and tutorial avaialble which outlines how to use HTTrack. For developers and programmers, there is info on site integration here. We hope you find this tool helpful.