When you are faced with the need to download a site from the web then there are several options.You can always go ahead and spend some days or weeks using FireFox or Internet Explorer and click every picture and video and choose "Save To" or "Save As". Just writing the path's for the jpg's and the videos may take up alot of your time. And chances are you may miss something. So what to do?
Get a download manager!
But which one ? I do not know many download managers, but some of the most known ones out there are:
- Down Them All http://www.downthemall.net/
- Get Right http://www.getright.com/
- ReGet http://www.reget.com/
You still have to visit every page and right clicking and choose "Download With ...". But you can do it much faster and you do not have to wait for downloads to complete before you begin a new download.
To circumvent having to click every link or at least every page you can get other tools. In general these tools are called Offline Browsers. They can automatically click every link on a website and altomaticially download every file from the website. So basically it is like if you took a copy of the website to your own harddrive. Some of the more common tools in the Offline Browser category are:
Get an Offline Browser!
- HTTP Weazel http://www.metaexception.com/en/products/HTW/
- HTTrack http://www.httrack.com/
- Offline Explorer http://www.metaproducts.com/
- Black Widow http://softbytelabs.com/us/bw/index.html
Personally I started off with the Weazel and had a short fling to the Track before I meet the one and only OE. But that is just personal experience. The Weazel is easy and so is the Widow. The learning curve for the Track is a little higher and OE can be too.Offline Browsers start by visiting the page you point them to. Then they automatically click every link on that page which leads them to all pages at "level 2". On level 2 they download everything to your harddrive and then they move on to click all links on level 2 so that they reach level 3 and so on.
These tools can work during the night, so you can leave your computer on and let it download a website while you sleep. The tools can also work as if there were 2,3 or 8 or more people downloading the site. So you are not limited to just 1 "virtual" person clicking. If you play around then avoid settings above 8, it is not nice for the website...and if the same person is hammering on a website with 8 differen "people" all wanting to download then chances are the webmaster may get pissed off. Set the limit to 2-3 and maybe even 4.
Downloading the Internet, please wait....
Now, this feature of automatically copying an entire website is simply great. BUT!, what if the website links to Google? Then you begin visiting every link Google has and all the sites it points to ? YEP!, you will begin downloading the entire internet.....And I bet you that you will run dry from memory and harddrive space before the download is finished.
Download only 1 website...
To avoid downloading the internet you have to limit your Offline Browser to only download from the website you want. You can most often do this by only downloading from "the starting server" or only download from "the starting domain".
Perhaps you do not want small thumbnails and other small graphic pieces which are displayed on every page. Maybe you do not even want to save the .htm / .html files. If this is the case then tick off stuff as .gif, .htm etc. This will tell your Offline Browser to NOT to save these file types to your harddrive.
I suggest you play around with an Offline Browser and a good site could be this site. Make a new project and download everything from the site only and avoid downloadin anything which does not belong to this website.
Browse the contents which was downloade and play around with settings which may allow you to both download this website and the graphics too.
if i pay for a months access to something, and use an offline downloader, will i still have access after the months up?
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