If you love a website, back it up (blog.mistys-internet.website)

That ArchiveWeb extension looks excellent for custom captures. Picking the pages and elements you want during capture is a great feature.

For quicker one-offs, SingleFile gives you a single HTML with all the media of a page: https://www.getsinglefile.com

If you're making archiving a more involved part of your workflow, I highly recommend ArchiveBox. It can save pretty much every type of file from everywhere, in almost every format you can imagine, while building a searchable index of the archives. Been using it successfully for many years: https://archivebox.io

Please, please buy books and keep them in good condition, and please archive websites with important information (assuming it's legal in your jurisdiction). There are still plenty of excellent sites and blogs around from the 2000s and even earlier, but they won't be there forever. Ironically, coding agents have made archival much easier -- I've always found problems with using pre-written tools, but Claude or Qwen make it trivial to download, test, and archive sites on your local.

It had lots of photos that I hand-scanned from printed film, back in the day when it took a good bit of time to scan photos manually.

The site was a running joke, where I would open it to show people that it still existed... until it didn't, and I couldn't find my backup of all of the photos. The archive sites have the 'bones' of the website, but not the photos. It was easily avoidable, which is why it is painful.

I thought it might be rose-tinted glasses, thinking that the earlier internet was better, but spending time retracing my teenage steps made me even more certain that it was indeed better. So many derpy little websites made by nerds, so many fun games and websites that weren't preying on vulnerable people, and everything spread out across many places - not centralised in the hands of large corporations. I've been using LLMs to have fun recreating concepts from that time, like my own forum software, as some sort of anti-progress. It's been fun.

You don't have to worry about having your copy easily accessible, and as a bonus it's also available for everyone else in the world.

I guess the web plugins could ideally get around it, but what about the CLI and app solutions?

I know yt-dlp has gone to great lengths to work this problem.

i managed to reconstruct (and then improve) it with an LLM:

https://scott-cpu.cs.montana.edu/

(Now if hard drives had not become so damn expensive—it's getting harder to be a digital hoarder like myself.)

I'm talking about forums... the bmw forum for your old car... the motorcycle forum for the enthusiast of the SV650... those places are full of anecdotes, people talking, lending a hand to another person... being humans and care...

Which is what social media is/should/was about, is what internet is about before the enshitification happened... I would vote to have this ID associated to you via check of your local goverment issued id and ONLY UPPON VERIFICATION of you being using that you can log and read and use those websites without tracking you (Yes 10,000 ifs where this is secure, handled in a confidential matter, the whole tech is not to track that you are doing something... but that a human is behind that, no api, no robot, no adds, no nothing... just the old school forum where you can go, talk, submit a photo... where someone who wanted to spend time to write something did it, SO WE CAN ENSURE TWO THINGS, A HUMAN IS THERE, AND NO FVK!NG CEO WILL ENSHITIFY IT, no to track people, but to know that a person is interacting there)

But because "empathy is the weakness" and shareholder value...

God forbid we have an AI-facilitated full Cyberpunk/.hack-style crash where everything gets wiped, the only things that will survive will be on paper. This is the recommendation I give my friends who are digital artists/writers; have a physical record of your efforts beyond what you want to sell.

This is on top of keeping your own digital archives. I'm still haunted by the deviantArt submission I didn't save. The creator took the piece down, then passed away a few years later. A Wayback Machine archive of his userpage with the piece as his featured upload still exists, but the image itself wasn't archived; it just shows a broken image.

But the modern web has made this unreasonable. Every webpage is 99% junk (CSS, JS, HTML structure, tracking pixels, UI images, navigation links, cryptominers (I joke)) and 1% content. You need a smart AI system to pick out the good parts, otherwise you'll quickly find yourself schlepping hundreds of gigs of junk to just preserve your favorite websites.

The better idea is: if you love information, back it up. Collect the knowledge from the website, not the website. And then preserve it. Create a free ebook. Or sell it on Amazon kindle. That'll last a lot longer than the website will, and any HTML backup of the site you could possibly make.