Backing up Der Flounder Revisited Once Again

Eleven years ago, I wrote a post on how I back up this blog. Overall, the reasons I’m backing up haven’t changed:

• I like this blog and don’t want to see it or its data disappear because of data loss
• WordPress.com’s free hosting doesn’t provide me with an automated backup method.

Two years ago, I wrote another post on how I needed to switch from hosting on a Mac to now hosting on a Raspberry Pi. The overall methodology hadn’t changed, I was creating a nightly mirror using HTTrack. This worked fine until the latest move to a new host in February 2023, where HTTrack was failing for me because the Raspberry Pi was running headless without a connected display and HTTrack was having problems with trying to launch a headless browser. After an hour of futzing with it, I moved to using wget. The wget tool has a number of handy options for mirroring websites, including the following:

• –mirror: Makes the download recursive, with recursive browsing and infinite recursion depth.
• –convert-links: Convert all the links to relative, so it will be suitable for offline viewing.
• –adjust-extension: Adds suitable filename extensions to filenames, (html, css, etc.) depending on their content-type.

Based on my research, using wget would be a decent replacement for what I had been doing with HTTrack and wouldn’t have the problems I was seeing with HTTrack not being able to launch a headless browser session. For those wanting to know more, please see below the jump.

Backing up Der Flounder Revisited

Nine years ago, I wrote a post on how I backup this blog. Overall, the reasons I’m backing up haven’t changed:

• I like this blog and don’t want to see it or its data disappear because of data loss.
• WordPress.com’s free hosting doesn’t provide me with an automated backup method.

To create the backups, I make a nightly mirror using HTTrack. As time has passed and host machines were replaced, I’ve moved the backup host a few times. For the last move, I decided for budgetary reasons to move off of using Macs and onto a Raspberry Pi. For those wanting to know more, please see below the jump.