No technical expert advice can be found here ;)

Anyone of you already know this situation: You found a really great and helpfull site on the internet, put a bookmark on it, and when you need the site and check back to it, it is discontinued and closed.

For me, this is a reason to mirror helpful and (to me) important websites locally to my computer. I usually used a tool called “WebDevil”, that had a view problems, but worked fine. Unfortunatly, this project now seems to be discontinued, since I was not able to get an actual copy of the program. So I began a search for a new application and found:

WebGrabber

WebGrabber is published under the GPL (“OpenSource Freeware”) by Eric Peyton of epicware Inc. and has everything you need to mirror a single website, or the complete internet to your local machine and many more features:

Any thinkable option can be set: ignoreing the robots.txt, rewriting the local saved version, rewriting the links (to get independent from the website), limit the mirroring to one website or even to the same directory on the website, syncing of the actual version of the website and your saved copy, resuming stopped downloads and many more. You can set the download-depth, the sleep time between the documents, max. transfer rates and even the buffer sizes.

Additionally, you can define a set of filters what to download and what not. WebGrapper is definitely the best and compfortable mirroring-tool for the Mac I’ve seen up to now.

Download Link: http://www.epicware.com/webgrabber.html

Since the website was several times not available for me and links in the readme are not longer valid, I’ll mirror this cool project here, since it seems to be discontinued too: webgrabber07tar

The sourcecode of this project (XCode) is included.

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