How to archive and back-up your online content

Any author, involved in online publishing, could potentially benefit from having a local back-up/archived copy of the published content, either articles, or blog post, or web-pages. The best practice of having local copies add the extra-convenience of editing the content in offline mode and also increase the level of protection against potential online vulnerabilities and possible interruptions in the Internet telecom.

In a context of this article, back-up procedure implies the ability to create the local copy of the online content, which is fully editable in the offline mode, i.e., without any need for Internet connection. Archiving procedure is different in terms that it does not create an editable local copy, but rather produce a kind of read-only “snapshot” of the online content with very limited (if any) ability of content modification, but still viewable in offline mode. These two approaches are not mutually exclusive; just vice versa, they effectively complement each other.

Both content back-up and archiving techniques imply the use of local storage devices, either internal/external computer hard-drives or solid-state storage modules, popular known as flash memory (the latter are generally more technologically advanced as they do not contain any moving parts and, therefore, provide unparalleled level of durability and reliability).

There is wide variety of techniques, which could be used to perform the local back-up/archiving of the online content, including the following rather simple and efficient ones, which requires minimum pre-requisites and could be used almost universally:

• To back-up a pure textual content without any graphic and/or multimedia elements, simple copy-paste technique will do the job, using the popular Microsoft Word document file as a container for the online content. To speed up the text selection use the mouse triple-click technique, described in the article at Examiner.com (as a quick reminder: mouse triple-click leads to the whole paragraph selection). Copy selected text either by using mouse right-click and corresponding pop-menu command item, or by using CTRL+C combination on the PCs keyboard, and then paste the selection using either mouse or keyboard shortcut CTRL+V into the Microsoft Word document. By the default, the content will be copied as HTML, but there is plenty of other options, available under menu sub-item “Paste Special…”, which includes formatted text, non-formatted text, etc.

Alternatively you could use the “Edit with Microsoft Office Word” option, available in Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) under the “Page” menu item (see the screen snapshot, attached to the article), which allows opening a document corresponding to the whole web page. By the default, the Microsoft Word document file will be opened in a read-only mode, so user should select “Save As…” option to make an editable local copy.

• To archive the page using popular Microsoft IE web browser, select the option “Save As...” under the “Page” menu item. This option allows creating a single file with extension “.mht”, containing all text and graphic components, pertinent to the web page; the file could be stored locally and viewed in offline mode. Default file name corresponds to the web page title, but it could be changed at any time. Essentially the same functionality is implemented in another popular Mozilla Firefox web browser, though it saves the files differently by creating a single “master” file with “.html” extension and a corresponding folder, containing all the elements pertinent to the original web page. The option "Save Page As..." could be found under Menu item "File" at the top of Firefox browser.

Note: Microsoft Office 2007 provides and option to save the files in popular PDF (portable document format) format. This requires the MS Office Add-In to be installed on the user's PC. The Add-In installable software component (SaveAsPDFandXPS.exe) is available for download free of charge from the Microsoft site .