Back Up Your Favorite Websites with WebCopier for Mac

A few years ago, back when I had dial-up Internet access, I was doing research on... something that I no longer remember, actually... and constantly having to dial up and login to my Internet account, then try to perform my research on the slow dial-up speeds (all the while annoying my roommates who wanted to talk on the phone), was getting a bit annoying. So I decided to try and find a way to download the complete website I was using as the main part of my research. There were definitely tools for this, even a few years ago, but they required a lot of typing of strange strings of characters, and didn't always get exactly what I wanted (although I chalk a lot of that up to my inexperience with the program).

I was thinking about that the other day, and decided to see what tools are out there now, that perform the same task. I found one right away, listed on Apple's Mac OSX software download page, called WebCopier. WebCopier is a shareware program costing $30.00, and appeared to do exactly what I want (make complete copies of a website for offline viewing), so I downloaded the 15-day trial copy, installed it, and took it for a spin.

And in spite of a couple aspects to the program I don't really like, it did a pretty good job.

The first website I tried it out on was my church's website. I've been looking at completely moving the website to a new hosting service (completely unofficially, since I'm not the church's website maintainer), so I wanted to see exactly how large a site I'm looking at.

Making the backup of the website was incredibly easy. To back-up a website, you only need to do the following:

1. Open a new Project and give it a name.

2. Give WebCopier the web address of your website.

3. If the website needs username/password information, provide it.

4. Select a spot where WebCopier will save the website on your hard drive.

5. If you want to select your own downloading parameters (such as only downloading html files and images, and not mp3s and videos), you can choose those options now, otherwise simply start the download using the built-in standard options.