There are many options why you need to restore an abandoned site, so we will not consider why to do it, but consider one of the methods of how to download website files for free from the web.archive.org service.
Downloading a website from the internet archive is pretty easy and straightforward. You can download an entire website from the Wayback machine in just a few minutes.
Tools
The choice of services for restoring sites from the archive depends primarily on your experience and knowledge in working with websites, hosting, and the basics of working with the command line, programming, etc., as well as on the size of the site that will be restored.
I will not focus on each one, you can see some of them in the tools section of my blog, in this article I will tell you how to do it for free using the Wayback Machine Downloader script
Wayback Machine Downloader user guide
- Go to github and download the Wayback machine downloader.
- Just make sure you copy the folder to your desktop and you don't need to do anything in that folder.
- Go to https://rubyinstaller.org/downloads and download the ruby installer. In my case, I downloaded this version
- Install ruby to your PC and we will use some commands to get the website we want to download from the Wayback Machine.
- Search for the ruby command prompt using the windows search bar and type in ruby then open the Start command prompt with Ruby
- Now copy and past (wayback_machine_downloader http://example.com) Make sure you replace example.com with the URL you want to download and hit enter.
wayback_machine_downloader http://example.com - Now wait for ruby to do the magic
- After the download is done, you can find your website file in: C:\Users\Username\websites
- All that remains for us is to upload the site files to the hosting and link a new or previously purchased domain.
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