Two Letters Re: Preparedness Digital Archives

Hi Jim,
On Friday, Angus suggested downloading the different sections (Body Armor, Sanitation, etc) of SurvivalBlog for keeping on a USB drive. May I suggest that people download by the month instead of [by the topical] section. This way, when JWR has archived a months’ worth of articles, you can easily update your archives on your USB by downloading the most recent month, rather than updating every different section.

I love the Blog! – Ryan in BC, Canada

 

James,
When I make a backup of SurvivalBlog, I use the following command:

wget –recursive –no-clobber –page-requisites –html-extension –convert-links –restrict-file-names=windows –domains survivalblog.com –no-parent survivalblog.com

This will create a directory which contains everything linked on survivalblog.com from the survivalblog.com domain which is navigable per normal in a browser by opening the index.html file contained within.

You can get wget from GNU.org.

Your Mac users can then convert the directory into a compressed, mountable disk-image with the command: (Replace the YYYYMMDD with the appropriate year, month and day of the snapshot.)

hdiutil create -srcfolder survivalblog.com -format UDZO YYYYMMDD-survivalblog.dmg

I can also convert this to a .iso if you’re interested, which can be burned from most operating systems. If you have access to a Mac, the command is:

hdiutil convert YYYYMMDD-survivalblog.dmg -format UDTO -o YYYYMMDD-survivalblog.iso
gzip -9 YYYYMMDD-survivalblog.iso.cdr

Once you have the iso, you can burn it to a CD-ROM for ease of browsing if you can’t mount it as a disk-image.

I only backup your site now about once every six months doing this. Please don’t do so any more often, since it uses a lot of bandwidth. Regards, – Mike B.