Mirroring a NoBlogs Blog with wget

wget can make a local copy of a public NoBlogs blog, including its pages, images, CSS, and other linked files.

1. Install wget

Linux

Debian, Ubuntu and similar systems:

sudo apt install wget

Fedora:

sudo dnf install wget

Check that it works:

wget --version

Windows — portable wget.exe

You don't need to install wget on Windows. You can download the standalone wget.exe program and run it directly.

1. Download the 64-bit Windows version of wget.exe.
2. Create a folder for your archive, for example C:\noblogs-archive.
3. Put wget.exe into that folder.
4. Open Command Prompt or PowerShell in that folder.

The folder should look something like this:

C:\noblogs-archive\
    wget.exe

You can then check that wget works by running:

wget.exe --version

You can download the Windows executable from the standalone wget.exe download.

2. Mirror the blog

Open a terminal in the directory where you want the archive to be stored and run:

wget --mirror --page-requisites --convert-links --adjust-extension --no-parent --wait=1 https://example.noblogs.org/

Replace example.noblogs.org with the actual blog address.

Windows

If wget.exe is in the same folder as your terminal's current directory, run:

wget.exe --mirror --page-requisites --convert-links --adjust-extension --no-parent --wait=1 https://example.noblogs.org/

Linux

wget --mirror --page-requisites --convert-links --adjust-extension --no-parent --wait=1 https://example.noblogs.org/

3. Where is the archive?

wget creates a directory named after the website. For example:

example.noblogs.org/

Open the directory and look for index.html. You can open it in a web browser and browse the mirrored site locally.

What the options mean

• --mirror — recursively download the website.
• --page-requisites — download files needed to display pages, such as images and CSS.
• --convert-links — convert downloaded links so they work locally.
• --adjust-extension — give downloaded HTML documents appropriate file extensions.
• --no-parent — don't follow links outside the blog's directory.
• --wait=1 — wait one second between requests to avoid hammering the server.

4. If the blog is large

Large blogs may take a long time to download. You can safely interrupt wget with Ctrl+C and run the same command again later. wget can continue working with files it has already downloaded.

For a more conservative archive, you can increase the delay:

wget --mirror --page-requisites --convert-links --adjust-extension --no-parent --wait=3 https://example.noblogs.org/

5. Important limitation

A wget mirror preserves the publicly accessible website, but it is not the same thing as a WordPress backup. It does not contain the site's database or administrator settings.

If you have access to the NoBlogs dashboard, consider also using WordPress's export function to create an XML content backup. Keeping both the XML export and the wget mirror provides much better protection against data loss.

6. Keep the archive safe

Once the download is complete, copy the archive to another drive or storage location. Ideally keep more than one copy.

The resulting directory is a static snapshot of the blog as it was accessible when wget crawled it.

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