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I want to get all the files for a given website at archive.org. Reasons might include:

  • the original author did not archived his own website and it is now offline, I want to make a public cache from it
  • I am the original author of some website and lost some content. I want to recover it
  • ...

How do I do that ?

Taking into consideration that the archive.org wayback machine is very special: webpage links are not pointing to the archive itself, but to a web page that might no longer be there. JavaScript is used client-side to update the links, but a trick like a recursive wget won't work.

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I tried different ways to download a site and finally I found the wayback machine downloader - which was built by Hartator (so all credits go to him, please), but I simply did not notice his comment to the question. To save you time, I decided to add the wayback_machine_downloader gem as a separate answer here.

The site at http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Restoring lists these ways to download from archive.org:

  • Wayback Machine Downloader, small tool in Ruby to download any website from the Wayback Machine. Free and open-source. My choice!
  • Warrick - Main site seems down.
  • Wayback downloaders - a service that will download your site from the Wayback Machine and even add a plugin for WordPress. Not free.
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  • 2
    i also wrote a "wayback downloader", in php, downloading the resources, adjusting links, etc: gist.github.com/divinity76/85c01de416c541578342580997fa6acf
    – hanshenrik
    Oct 18, 2017 at 18:08
  • @ComicSans, On the page you've linked, what is an Archive Team grab??
    – Pacerier
    Mar 15, 2018 at 14:17
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    @Pacerier it means (sets of) WARC files produced by Archive Team (and usually fed into Internet Archive's wayback machine), see archive.org/details/archiveteam
    – Nemo
    Jan 20, 2019 at 14:47
  • Posting for recent users: Wayback Machine Downloader only downloads .HTML files and not anything else.
    – non_linear
    Oct 9, 2023 at 1:48
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    As a note: archive.org has added a rate limit which breaks most, if not all solutions to this post. There are 2 pull requests to fix wayback_machine_downloader but there has been no work on that repo from the maintainer in around a year or so. For the shell script solutions, you must add at least a 4 second delay between consecutive requests to avoid getting rate limited and your connections refused.
    – sww1235
    Nov 17, 2023 at 2:49
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This can be done using a bash shell script combined with wget.

The idea is to use some of the URL features of the wayback machine:

  • http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://domain/* will list all saved pages from http://domain/ recursively. It can be used to construct an index of pages to download and avoid heuristics to detect links in webpages. For each link, there is also the date of the first version and the last version.
  • http://web.archive.org/web/YYYYMMDDhhmmss*/http://domain/page will list all version of http://domain/page for year YYYY. Within that page, specific links to versions can be found (with exact timestamp)
  • http://web.archive.org/web/YYYYMMDDhhmmssid_/http://domain/page will return the unmodified page http://domain/page at the given timestamp. Notice the id_ token.

These are the basics to build a script to download everything from a given domain.

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16

You can do this easily with wget.

wget -rc --accept-regex '.*ROOT.*' START

Where ROOT is the root URL of the website and START is the starting URL. For example:

wget -rc --accept-regex '.*http://www.math.niu.edu/~rusin/known-math/.*' http://web.archive.org/web/20150415082949fw_/http://www.math.niu.edu/~rusin/known-math/

Note that you should bypass the Web archive's wrapping frame for START URL. In most browsers, you can right-click on the page and select "Show Only This Frame".

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    This was greatly useful and super simple! Thanks! I noticed that even though the START URL was a specific Wayback version, it pulled every date of the archive. This may be circumvented by adjusting the ROOT URL, however.
    – Neil Monroe
    Mar 31, 2020 at 15:32
  • Update to my previous comment: The resources in the site may be spread across various archive dates, so the command did not pull all the versions of the archive. You will need to then merge these back into a single folder and clean up the HTML.
    – Neil Monroe
    Mar 31, 2020 at 16:43
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    this actually worked for me, although I removed the --accept-regex part, otherwise not the whole page was downloaded
    – FurloSK
    Apr 9, 2021 at 7:58
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There is a tool specifically designed for this purpose, Warrick: https://code.google.com/p/warrick/

It's based on the Memento protocol.

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    As far as I managed to use this (in May 2017), it just recovers what archive.is holds, and pretty much ignores what is at archive.org; it also tries to get documents and images from the Google/Yahoo caches but utterly fails. Warrick has been cloned several times on GitHub since Google Code shut down, maybe there are some better versions there.
    – Gwyneth Llewelyn
    May 31, 2017 at 16:41
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Wayback Machine Downloader works great. Grabbed the pages - .html, .js, .css and all the assets. Simply ran the index.html locally.

With Ruby installed, simply do:

gem install wayback_machine_downloader
wayback_machine_downloader http://example.com -c 5 # -c 5 adds concurrency for much faster downloads

If your connection fails half-way through a large download, you can even run it again and it will regrab any missing pages

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  • This has been said before.
    – Toto
    Mar 31, 2023 at 8:39
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    @Toto Sure, but this is a recent answer that has some explanation on how to use the command.
    – Geremia
    Jun 8, 2023 at 22:53
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I was able to do this using Windows Powershell.

  • go to wayback machine and type your domain
  • click URLS
  • copy/paste all the urls into a text file (like VS CODE). you might repeat this because wayback only shows 50 at a time
  • using search and replace in VS CODE change all the lines to look like this
Invoke-RestMethod -uri "https://web.archive.org/web/20200918112956id_/http://example.com/images/foobar.jpg" -outfile "images/foobar.jpg"
  • using REGEX search/repl is helpful, for instance change pattern example.com/(.*) to example.com/$1" -outfile "$1"

The number 20200918112956 is DateTime. It doesn't matter very much what you put here, because WayBack will automatically redirect to a valid entry.

  • Save the text file as GETIT.ps1 in a directory like c:\stuff
  • create all the directories you need such as c:\stuff\images
  • open powershell, cd c:\stuff and execute the script.
  • you might need to disable security, see link
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