Taking snapshots of your site.

Incremental 'snapshots' by date.

[bouncybunny]

I run a news and resources web site, which is updated regularly. Most articles from the home page are archived, but some is removed when no longer relevent.

Now the site is backed up daily by my host and I make regular archives, but this question is not really about that.

For copyright/legal/sanity reasons, I'm trying to find the best method for taking a daily snapshot of the content of the front page (and other pages that change regularly). If I really had to I could ask my host, but that's not really a reliable solution.

Any suggestions?

[ronburk]

Well, there's probably a better specific solution to your problem, but such problems crop up all the time. The general solution is to have/know a general-purpose scripting tool for Windows administration.

For example, I use JPSoft's 4NT (no affiliation, just a satisfied user). To solve your problem, I would just schedule a daily batch job to run. The batch file (I use 4NT as a replacement for cmd.exe, so it can execute .bat files) would be no more complicated than:

copy http://www.yerdomain.com/ \archivedir\%@replace[/,-,%_date] 

For example, today, this would copy the home page to a file named \archivedir\11-10-06

It takes time to get comfortable with a general-purpose tool, but OTOH if it's a good enough tool, it will save you a lot of time looking for more specific solutions over the years.

[bouncybunny]

Thanks. Although, I use Macs and the server is Linux.

But, I can run Cron jobs on the server to make actual file backups. But what I am really after is, rather than data file backups, is some kind of 'screen shot' tool, with some kind of date and time stamp facility that saves a JPEG image of the home page (and other specific pages) every day. Preferably on the server side of things.

I'm guessing that I am asking for a lot, but if anyone has any ideas, or come across a tool of this kind, I'd be overjoyed.

[shri]

If you have access to an XP desktop, Snagit has the ability to handle automated snapshots.