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

Social recommendations and mentions

• 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 / 2 months 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 / 3 months 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 / 4 months 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: 5 months 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 / 6 months 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 / 8 months 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 / 9 months 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 / 9 months 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 / 9 months ago

• Self hosted YouTube media server – Tube Archivist

  You should also check out https://archivebox.io/. - Source: Hacker News / 10 months 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 / 10 months 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 / 10 months 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 / 11 months ago

• Need a way of saving websites

  For some things you can use the different options with archivebox.io. Source: 11 months ago

• Useful browser extensions and their associated selfhosted services.

  Basically the ArchiveBox bookmarklet? It has a collection method for git. Seems they also have an extension, https://github.com/tjhorner/archivebox-exporter. Source: 12 months ago

• What’s the best way to save a webpage?

  You can run an ArchiveBox node that has several backup methods. Normally I just try them all. If you find out you prefer the PDF or the screenshot or etc. Then you could narrow it down to those methods. Source: about 1 year ago

• Wayback: Self-hosted archiving service integrated with Internet Archive

  ArchiveBox also saves a Readability version: > Article Text: article.html/json Article text extraction using Readability & Mercury [0] [0]: https://archivebox.io/#output-formats. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago

• Wayback: Self-hosted archiving service integrated with Internet Archive

  I love all these kind of projects as I tend to be paranoid of losing good online content. It’s also unclear to me how wWayback works. It seems more like an API than a self-hosted service. I’m currently using ArchiveBox [0], which provides a complete API + UI. - [0] https://archivebox.io/. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago

• Archive.today vs WaybackMachine? Are there global initiative centralized?

  I found this iniciative: https://archivebox.io/. Source: about 1 year ago

• Setting up Archivebox on Truenas Scale

  I recently got into self-hosting. I've wanted to create a self-hosted web archive and my friend recommended an Archivebox, unfortunately TrueCharts doesn't have a chart for it so I had to do it myself. Here's my guide on how to setup Archivebox on Truenas Scale. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago

• Did Mozilla Ever Open Source Pocket?

  I also found https://floccus.org/ and https://archivebox.io/ on Alternativeto, for self-hosters. Source: about 1 year ago