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Re: Archiving websites



MartM9241@aol.com wrote:
>
> Dear Shannon
>
> Have you ever tried archiving websites using CD-ROMs or FTP?
>
> -Marty

I'm assuming that you are talking about burning the files to a CD-ROM?
This would work as a storage, but you would still need to decide how you
were going to store the files initially.  (ie what format are you going
to use.)  FTP is just a way of retrieving files from a remote server,
and I would recommend a different way if possible.  You would have to
enter each directory on the remote web server, and download all the
files in this directory, move to the next and download those, etc, etc.
(You get the point, too much manual labor.)  If you are going to
transfer files using FTP, I would write a perl script that uses the FTP
modules, (for automating FTP calls), and then write a recursive function
that calls itself and automates the navigation of the directory tree.
(If you are going to use FTP for some of your stuff, let me know, and I
will see if I can help you with the programming aspect of it.)

Therefore, the question is still how are we going to deal with the files
initially?  I would suggest, before asking if someone will give me FTP
access to the machine, (esp in your situation, where you are looking for
inhouse archiving of files), ask the system administrator to write an
automated job, (cron for unix, scheduled task for windows, (on the
remote server that is housing the web server)), that will zip up the
files that you want into one file, and deposit that in a directory that
you have FTP access to.  You can then FTP into the machine and pull one
file, instead of 100+.  Then you can manipulate that file as you wish on
your machine.  (Since you are running windows, see if they can "zip" it
up, cause winzip, the zip program that I recommend, plus it has a free
eval copy, www.winzip.com, cannot modify the existing tar file, if you
get it tarred, instead of zipped. Meaning that you will have to unzip
the files, and then create a new zip file, if you want to modify the
file at all. (If you get a file that is .tar.gz, that means that it is
tarred, and then gzipped, which compresses the file for quicker
transfer.  This is good, and winzip can still extract the files.)  Once
you have unzipped the files on your machine, you can manipulate them in
any way you desire.  (Such as, changing their format to pdf, leaving
them plain text, burning the pdf, or plain text, to cd, etc.)

Don't let the sys admin jerk you around, tarring or zipping the files is
not that big of a deal, and it is easier for them to do it then you :)
(Saves you a lot of time and hassle too!)

Hope this helps!
--
Shannon Peevey
Central Web Support
UNT-Computing Center
speeves@unt.edu
940-369-8876

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