Backing up your Personal website.

Like many people you have one of those cheap personal web sites that don’t allow direct shell access or file access to the server. This is a real problem if you want make a copy of your web site for backup or other reasons. The solution is simple but requires using the command line in a terminal.

The program wget allows you to make a copy of a web site with the command line option –mirror. This allows you to download a complete copy of the files on your web site to your home computer.

This is an example of how to do it:

wget -nv –mirror http://YourWebSite.com/

This should download all files on your web site except possibly the CSS files. To find the CSS files you can view the HTML source of your home page by right clicking your mouse while you are viewing your web site in a browser and then selecting “Source” or “View Source” in the popup menu. The location of the CSS files will be listed somewhere in the top of the displayed source information. Search for .css to find it. You can then (usually) add the specified directories and css file name to the basic url of your website and view the css files in your web browser. This allows you to copy and paste the CSS information into an editor and save it on your computer.

For more information check out the manual:
http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/manual/wget.html

From the guys at TuxMagazine.com. I don’t think this will backup any databases but this is certainly a great example of the command line making something easier.

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