Use BackupURL To Save & Share A Website As You See It

Have you ever sent a link to someone, but when they open it they do not see what you wanted them to see? The website could have been shut down due to a take-down notice, the webpage could have got hit by the Digg effect or the author could have changed the information themselves. Either way the person you sent to view something cannot see it.

So what do you do? Do you send a screen shot? Then they can’t see the whole page and follow links. Do you make a local copy of the website and publish it? That would be too time consuming.

I know, you want to know what you can use to easily make a backup of a website so it is available to any one you refer to it. Enter backupURL.

backupURL allows you to add a URL to its search box like so:

You hit the only button available that says Backup! and it does its thing. I chose a recent article I did on the Cornflicker worm located at: http://www.asktheadmin.com/2009/03/april-1st-is-coming-beware-of-the-cornflicker-worm-and-impending-doom.html

After feeding backupURL my URL I get two links back from it as follows:

Cached URL : http://backupurl.com/cache/aevdyr.html
Short Cached URL : http://backupurl.com/aevdyr

By following either of these links you will arrive at the cached page. It will be identical to your original content except it had the backupURL banner along the top of your screen,. You can see what I mean by looking at the picture below or following one of the links above.

So now even if I was to change the content, remove the post or go offline you would still be able to read the story or forward it along to someone else. This is a great tool to use when reading about 0 day exploits or some sort of wonderful hack that you know will not make it through the day.

We have all been there and seen a cool project ““ but when you get back to it you see that it has been taken down. Sometimes you can use the Google cache feature but sometimes even that does not help as the Google cache has been known to be cleared on more than one occasion as well.

Do you have another method for saving webpages as is and sharing them? Let us know in the comments.

Tagged: backup • cache • URL

Karl L. Gechlik

Karl L. Gechlik here from AskTheAdmin.com doing a weekly guest blogging spot for our new found friends at MakeUseOf.com. I run my own consulting company, manage AskTheAdmin.com and work a full 9 to 5 job on Wall street as a System Administrator.

Nero

I just needed to research something for this very case and came across backupURL in my travels.

It’s ok but doesn’t handle rich media well. It’s good for really quick fixes though.

The service that blew me away though was Iterasi (www.iterasi.net) which not only does a much better job with embedded content but gives you the possibility to create RSS feeds from the pages that you’re archiving.
http://mccormicky.com/ mccormicky

Totally love this.
paf

What do I do? I use Paparazzi, a freeware for Mac that takes a screenshot of all the web pages and not only what you see on the screen.
Jimmy

I click on file at top of page, and then click on “send Link”.
This only takes a very short time.
PollyQ

This doesn’t handle sharing, but the Firefox extension ScrapBook is amazing for collecting & storing snapshots of web pages.
Shreela

I used to make personal backups with Furl, but they’ve been taken over by Diigo. I already had an acct with Diigo, so all I had to do was import my Furls to Diigo.

I checked whether the Furl caches transferred to Diigo, and at first it appeared that they did. But after checking a few more, I found a few of my transferred Furl caches loaded as parked domains on Diigo’s cached copy (geez, that was complicated to type; hope it made sense). I did download my caches as a zip file from Furl before I exported them to Diigo, but they’re not named by what I titled them, only by weird numbers (Furl truly failed at that).

I played around with BackupUrl, and liked how we can share the cached copy. But I really hate how we have to remove the http:// portion of the url, or it won’t work. I can copy an url to clipboard with 2 clicks using FF, yet I have to edit the url before it’ll work with BackupUrl. That bugged me many years ago with Yahoo bookmarks, and now another site is doing it many years later, sigh!