BEST WAY TO DOWNLOAD FULL WEBSITE WITH WGET

UPDATED NEW ARTICLE HERE: wget – new article covers this and also how to download from directory/browseable websites.

NOTE: below worked when my site was hosted by GoogleSites, but now that I have it own my own server with WordPress it might have different results.

I show two ways, the first way is just one command that doesnt run in the background – the second one runs in the background and in a different “shell” so you can get out of your ssh session and it will continue either way

First make a folder to download the websites to and begin your downloading: (note if downloading www.infotinks.com, you will get a folder like this: /websitedl/www.infotinks.com/ )

(STEP1)

mkdir /websitedl/
cd /websitedl/

(STEP2)

1st way:
wget –limit-rate=200k –no-clobber –convert-links –random-wait -r -p -E -e robots=off -U mozilla http://www.infotinks.com
2nd way:

IN THE BACKGROUND DO WITH NOHUP IN FRONT AND & IN BACK

nohup wget –limit-rate=200k –no-clobber –convert-links –random-wait -r -p -E -e robots=off -U mozilla http://www.infotinks.com &

THEN TO VIEW OUTPUT ( it will put a nohup.out file where you ran the command):

tail -f nohup.out

WHAT DO ALL THE SWITCHES MEAN:
–limit-rate=200k: Limit download to 200 Kb /sec
–no-clobber: don’t overwrite any existing files (used in case the download is interrupted and
resumed).
–convert-links: convert links so that they work locally, off-line, instead of pointing to a website online
–random-wait: Random waits between download – websites dont like their websites downloaded
-r: Recursive – downloads full website
-p: downloads everything even pictures (same as –page-requsites, downloads the images, css stuff and so on)
-E: gets the right extension of the file, without most html and other files have no extension
-e robots=off: act like we are not a robot – not like a crawler – websites dont like robots/crawlers unless they are google/or other famous search engine
-U mozilla: pretends to be just like a browser Mozilla is looking at a page instead of a crawler like wget

(DIDNT INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING AND WHY)
-o=/websitedl/wget1.txt: log everything to wget_log.txt – didnt do this because it gave me no output on the screen and I dont like that id rather use nohup and & and tail -f the output from nohup.out
-b: because it runs it in background and cant see progress I like “nohup <commands> &” better
–domain=infotinks.com: didnt include because this is hosted by google so it might need to step into googles domains
–restrict-file-names=windows: modify filenames so that they will work in Windows as well. Seems to work good without it

One thought on “wget full website – full site download

  1. Very interesting article, many thanks. I am having trouble however to get the images/files of a webpage that has its links wrong, that is, some of the links have become “http://websitehttp//website.file.extension”.
    Is there a way to tell wget that, if no content is found, it has to look in the address “http//website.file.extension” instead of “http://websitehttp//website.file.extension” ?

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