ArchiveBox Reviews and Details

Questions & Answers

1. Which are the primary technologies used for building your product?

   • Django
   • SQLite
   • Wget
   • Chromium
   • Youtube-dl / yt-dlp
   • singlefile
   • readability
   • mercury
   • git
   • ripgrep
   • sonic

2. Who are some of the biggest customers of ArchiveBox?

   • Monadical.com
   • United Nations
   • many more... https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/wiki/Web-Archiving-Community

3. What's the story behind ArchiveBox?

   ArchiveBox aims to enable more of the internet to be saved from deterioration by empowering people to self-host their own archives. The intent is for all the web content you care about to be viewable with common software in 50 - 100 years without needing to run ArchiveBox or other specialized software to replay it.

   Vast treasure troves of knowledge are lost every day on the internet to link rot. As a society, we have an imperative to preserve some important parts of that treasure, just like we preserve our books, paintings, and music in physical libraries long after the originals go out of print or fade into obscurity.

   Whether it's to resist censorship by saving articles before they get taken down or edited, or just to save a collection of early 2010's flash games you love to play, having the tools to archive internet content enables to you save the stuff you care most about before it disappears.

   Image from WTF is Link Rot?... The balance between the permanence and ephemeral nature of content on the internet is part of what makes it beautiful. I don't think everything should be preserved in an automated fashion--making all content permanent and never removable, but I do think people should be able to decide for themselves and effectively archive specific content that they care about.

   Because modern websites are complicated and often rely on dynamic content, ArchiveBox archives the sites in several different formats beyond what public archiving services like Archive.org/Archive.is save. Using multiple methods and the market-dominant browser to execute JS ensures we can save even the most complex, finicky websites in at least a few high-quality, long-term data formats.

4. Why should a person choose ArchiveBox over its competitors?

   ArchiveBox differentiates itself from similar self-hosted projects by providing both a comprehensive CLI interface for managing your archive, a Web UI that can be used either independently or together with the CLI, and a simple on-disk data format that can be used without either.

   ArchiveBox is neither the highest fidelity nor the simplest tool available for self-hosted archiving, rather it's a jack-of-all-trades that tries to do most things well by default. It can be as simple or advanced as you want, and is designed to do everything out-of-the-box but be tuned to suit your needs.

   If you want better fidelity for very complex interactive pages with heavy JS/streams/API requests, check out ArchiveWeb.page and ReplayWeb.page.

   If you want more bookmark categorization and note-taking features, check out Archivy, Memex, Polar, or LinkAce.

   If you need more advanced recursive spider/crawling ability beyond --depth=1, check out Browsertrix, Photon, or Scrapy and pipe the outputted URLs into ArchiveBox.

5. How would you describe your primary audience?

   • journalists
   • lawyers
   • librarians
   • digital preservation specialists
   • researchers
   • students
   • homelab / self-hosting community

Is ArchiveBox good?

Social recommendations and mentions

• Linkwarden: FOSS self-hostable bookmarking with AI-tagging and page archival

  I've used https://historio.us since 2011 and still pay for it to keep access to all the pages I've archived over the years. The price has been kept low enough that I can't bring myself to cancel it even though I've been using self-hosted https://archivebox.io/ for the last few years. I always include an archived link whenever I reference something in documentation. That's my main use at the moment. However, I... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago

• Ask HN: How Do You Bookmark?

  2. Drop the link into my instance of ArchiveBox [0] and will return to it a few weeks/months later or, more often than not, never again [0] https://archivebox.io/. - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago

• Internet Archive breached again through stolen access tokens

  Is anyone using ArchiveBox regularly? It's a self-hosted archiving solution. Not the ambitious decentralized system I think this comment is thinking of but a practical way for someone to run an archive for themselves. https://archivebox.io/. - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago

• Tell HN: The Wayback Machine is up, in read-only mode

  I used to solely depend on Wayback machine to automate archiving pages, now I am archiving webpages using selenium python package on https://archive.ph/ and https://ghostarchive.org/ This told me not to depend on 3rd party parties. Might self-host https://archivebox.io/. - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago

• I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and I don't know what to do with them

  Https://archivebox.io/ For those with an interest. My del.icio.us collection (what was still online) lives on my NAS now. - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago

• Why are so many books listed as "Borrow Unavailable" at the Internet Archive?

  And one nice tool for scraping archives for yourself is https://archivebox.io/ a nice frontend by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nikisweeting. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago

• Ask HN: What do you use for reading papers?

  I use https://archivebox.io/ and point it at the uri. I tend to not able to find the page even 15 minutes ago if I'm on a dense information search. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago

• 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later

  There's also https://archivebox.io which can take your bookmarks and archive them in many ways. Unfortunately back when I tried it last time it was a big buggy, I wish there was a better solution to build a nice archive of the sites I visit more often just in case. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago

• Vice website is shutting down

  If you really want to save the content for yourself, use something like https://archivebox.io/ I've been running a local instance for a few years now and download/save tech articles all time. I can search and find them as needed. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago

• Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?

  I guess your best chance is to use something like https://archivebox.io/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago

• Linkhut: A Social Bookmarking Site

  Delicious[1] was delicous, and Pinboard[2] is just there. Not into bookmarks that much except for less than 10 significant websites. I might look at ArchiveBox[3] or something like it to bookmark and take a snapshot. Again, none of them as important as it used to be. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website) 2. https://pinboard.in 3. https://archivebox.io. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago

• Best practices for archiving websites

  Look into ArchiveBox, which is purpose-built for this process, and provides a wealth of options for the archival process. From the website:. Source: over 1 year ago

• Omnivore – free, open source, read-it-later App

  Perhaps ArchiveBox[0] will work for you? A self-hosted archiver to save websites in various formats. Has a section on that page for alternatives as well that might work too. [0]: https://archivebox.io/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago

• A group of Motherboard folks just spun up their own new independent outlet

  I am not sure about Russian hosted, but an alternative to archive.org is archive.is. Centralized services eventually get compelled or corrupted. I setup https://archivebox.io/ on my server. Some other options have been reported here. - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago

• Trafilatura: Python tool to gather text on the Web

  Archive box (https://archivebox.io/) will create a local dump of any site in a multitude of formats from raw html, printed PDF, and extracted body text. Also has option to request internet archive to trigger a scrape of the page. - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago

• Blocked by Cloudflare

  Assembling the list of links to archive is a manual process--I just log them in an Obsidian notebook with a category and summary, and I later post it to my blog. (I don't really think other people care, it's more for me to be able to find past things I've found interesting.) For the archival process I use ArchiveBox[1] running as a container on my NAS; I just grep through the note for `http|https` and feed the... - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago

• Show HN: Linkwarden – An open source collaborative bookmark manager

  I've used Raindrop[1] for the last few years and it works well - cross device support, archived pages, and tags/folders. Going to check out Linkwarden since I really like the idea of being able to self-host something similar since Raindrop could one day disappear (#googlereaderneverforget). A feature Raindrop has is it can export bookmarks to a standard xml file, which I then have a script that automatically adds... - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago

• Self hosted YouTube media server – Tube Archivist

  You should also check out https://archivebox.io/. - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago

• Pocket: It gets worse the more you use it

  I have been using [ArchiveBox](https://archivebox.io) with good success, but it can be a bit daunting to set up. - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago

• Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

  My use of Evernote has been replaced with two apps a few years ago when they abandoned native apps: 1. https://obsidian.md/ for all the notes. 2. https://archivebox.io/ for almost all webpage clippings. - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago

• BetaWiki – An open encyclopedia of software history

  I love these kind of wikis. Tbh, I'm obsessed with content conservation so any initiative like this brings my attention. Am I the only one running an ArchiveBox [1] for a personal archive? - [1] https://archivebox.io/. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago