easy buttonI needed to backup a website that I run onto a Linux server in my garage, and wondered what the easy button tool for Linux on the command line would be. Just try searching Google for “Website backup using Linux Command Line” and you don’t get what I was looking for. What I should have searched for was “Website Mirroring With wget” but I didn’t know what tool I was looking for, remember? As you may have guessed, I finally found a page full of ads and some outdated command line options for Windows describing how to website mirror with wget.

wget is a great tool for website backup, offline browsing, or mirroring as it is known in the server realm. A simple one line command gets you all the files and images that are accessable from the website index and puts them in a directory it creates named after the domain name:

$ <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/">wget</a> -mp http://<a href="http://anencephaly.net/">anencephaly.net</a>/

Yeah! Job accomplished. That was easy, and I didn’t even have to ask the reindeer.