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Comment by squarefoot | Hacker News Reader

Be sure to donate some quid to the Internet Archive (archive.org) to support their efforts to preserve (not just) old content, then do your best to make local copies of anything you find of value, just in case they disappear one day. A good number of mostly technical pages I have in my bookmarks file, that grew steadily and has been moved during installations for over 20 years, now point to their latest complete backup before the said page went silent. The Internet Archive is a huge boon to everyone.

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I realized I was overusing bookmarks. I now save webpages (perhaps as PDF) if it contains information I want to refer to later, such as an insightful article, technical information, a humorous bit, or the like.

Bookmarks are good only for links to things for which only the most current version is worth accessing. That’s my banking websites, a shopping site, my employer’s remote desktop system, etc.

There's also https://archivebox.io which can take your bookmarks and archive them in many ways. Unfortunately back when I tried it last time it was a big buggy, I wish there was a better solution to build a nice archive of the sites I visit more often just in case.

I found the Chrome it uses for fetching needs a kick every couple of days. That definitely improved my experience.

On that same vein, shoutout to Epub Press[0]: a browser extension/web service that packs selected open tabs into a neat conformant .epub file.

0: https://epub.press

I save webpages as PDF because they retain the images and fonts of the original page. One issue I run into is that sticky headers/footers used on websites often obscure top/bottom text of the page when exported to PDF. This can be addressed by using UBO to remove the sticky DOM elements before saving, but it's a bit of a hassle.

singlefile browser extension is quite good in this regard

Others have recommended ArchiveBox, I will recommend using any bookmarking tool that fires off a web request to the Wayback Machine to archive a page when you create the bookmark.

I have a bookmarklet that points to:

  javascript:(function(){daurl='https://web.archive.org/save/';if(location.href.indexOf('http')!=0){input=prompt('URL:','http://');if(input!=null){location.href=daurl+input}}else{location.href=daurl+location.href;}})();

This has the keyword "way" in my Firefox bookmark.

So when I'm on a page I want to save, I just press Ctrl-L (to focus the URL bar), then type "way" to save the page on Wayback Machine.

This is something a browser could in theory do for you.

How much disk space did that consume?

I like the idea that in addition to saving the page, you can annotate it as well.

Not a noticeable amount in this age when even expensive SSD storage has multiple gigabytes. Even pages with multiple images just aren’t that big on a typical hard drive.

But I'm still backing up offsite and have to consider that as well.

I wish the Internet Archive would split itself into two entities: one that simply archives web sites, and the other that does everything else (e.g., edgy IP testing of ebooks and video games). That way if the "other" entity gets sued into oblivion, the web sites remain. I think what the former is doing is a critical service for humankind, and I do donate, but I worry about their future.

Don't worry.

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