It uses Internet Explorer as a module, and calls each individual resource separately, instead of file copying from IE's cache, which is weird and slow, especially when hundreds of images are involved.

And SurfOffline doesn't appear to be supported anymore, i.e. the support email's inbox is full.

edit: Aaaaand SurfOffline doesn't save to .html files with a directory structure!!! It stores everything in some kind of sql database, and it only saves to .mht and .chm files, which are deprecated Microsoft help file formats!!!

What it does have is a built in web server that only works while the program is running.

So what I plan to do is have the program up but doing nothing, while I sick Httrack on the 127.0.0.1 web address for my ripped website.

Httrrack will hopefully "extract" the website to .html format.

Whew, what a hassle!

[–] zabadoh@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

To continue my travails:

Httrack didn't do a great job: It was slow, even copying from the same machine, and it flattened the directory structure of the website it was writing, making it almost un-navigable.

Here's where Cyotek WebCopy shines: It's copying the website from SurfOffline's database webserver quickly, so I should have the entire website re-extracted very soon!

[–] marsara9@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Unless you have an account there's no easy way to get access to the content on the page. Once you have an account there's technically nothing stopping you from just saving the HTML file to your computer.

Something else you can try though, assuming you don't have an account, is to just turn off JavaScript. If the site lets you partially load the content and then asks you to create an account to read more, they usually just block the content by having JavaScript add an opaque overlay. With JavaScript disabled, obviously it's not there to add the overlay and you're able to keep reading.

[–] zabadoh@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have an account, so that's not a problem. The problem is how to automate going into every little content page and downloading the content, including the hi-res files.

[–] tekchic@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm on a Mac and use SiteSucker so I know that's not super helpful but for windows you could try wGet or WebCopy? https://www.cyotek.com/cyotek-webcopy / https://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/wget.htm

[–] zabadoh@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Webcopy looks promising if I can get the crawler part of it to work with this site's authentication...

edit: I couldn't get Webcopy's spider to authenticate correctly.

Webcopy uses the deprecated version of Internet Explorer in Windows 10 as a module, and I can log into the website using the Capture Forms browser dialog, but the cookies or whatever else don't translate over to the spider.

[–] Derkis@rammy.site 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you're open to docker options, I've used and recommend ArchiveBox. It supports using a login to rip sites, and you can set it to rip once or on a schedule, etc.

I think they have a desktop app version in the works if you were looking for a more of a one-time approach.

[–] zabadoh@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I installed and played around with ArchiveBox after your suggestion.

The login/cookie copying function seems to be oriented to how Chromium is installed on Linux, which I don't have up and running in any meaningful way, and there doesn't seem to be any support place where I can ask questions.

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