Downloading Web Site

[Jeff Gaines]

It never rains....

My daughter's website has been hacked and, effectively deleted. The
company that maintains it and arranges hosting has said hers was the only
target and that on checking their system the only one out off all the
sites they manage that has never been backed up.

Obviously questions to be answered for the future but they are re-building
it from scratch to get her back in business, it is the only thing that
stops her from standing on my doorstep with kids in tow saying she has
nowhere to live!

Once it is back up can she download it, i.e. is there a tool that will
download a complete web site, pictures and all, for future security? It
sounds a bit hacky but she can't risk being in this position again.

[Richard Kettlewell]

Post by Jeff Gaines
It never rains....
My daughter's website has been hacked and, effectively deleted. The
company that maintains it and arranges hosting has said hers was the
only target and that on checking their system the only one out off all
the sites they manage that has never been backed up.
Obviously questions to be answered for the future but they are
re-building it from scratch to get her back in business, it is the
only thing that stops her from standing on my doorstep with kids in
tow saying she has nowhere to live!
Once it is back up can she download it, i.e. is there a tool that will
download a complete web site, pictures and all, for future security?
It sounds a bit hacky but she can't risk being in this position again.

wget can do it. But if her current provider can’t do backups then
perhaps she should switch to one that can.

[Mike Scott]

Post by Richard Kettlewell

Post by Jeff Gaines
Once it is back up can she download it, i.e. is there a tool that will
download a complete web site, pictures and all, for future security?
It sounds a bit hacky but she can't risk being in this position again.

wget can do it. But if her current provider can’t do backups then
perhaps she should switch to one that can.

It's useful, but not complete. It only traces links from page to page,
so if perchance there's a page that has no links to it, it would not be
downloaded unless she ran a separate wget for it. Nor would it pick up
any databases, log files, cgi scripts or similar.

The only web site I've run on a commercial hosting site was made locally
and uploaded nightly by weex, an rsync-like program. Bomb-proof. But
that wouldn't work for a commerce site.


She has the usual problem - as soon as you trust someone else with your
data, you're at their mercy. Sounds, as the PP said, she should switch
provider.

[Abandoned Trolley]

Post by Jeff Gaines
It never rains....
My daughter's website has been hacked and, effectively deleted. The
company that maintains it and arranges hosting has said hers was the
only target and that on checking their system the only one out off all
the sites they manage that has never been backed up.
Obviously questions to be answered for the future but they are re-
building it from scratch to get her back in business, it is the only
thing that stops her from standing on my doorstep with kids in tow
saying she has nowhere to live!
Once it is back up can she download it, i.e. is there a tool that will
download a complete web site, pictures and all, for future security? It
sounds a bit hacky but she can't risk being in this position again.

If you can find a copy of Microsoft Expression Web and get that to work,
then theres a feature which allows you to copy a complete web site from
the root page.


Its a bit of a faff but it does work and it should be free

[GB]

Post by Jeff Gaines
It never rains....
My daughter's website has been hacked and, effectively deleted. The
company that maintains it and arranges hosting has said hers was the
only target and that on checking their system the only one out off all
the sites they manage that has never been backed up.
Obviously questions to be answered for the future but they are re-
building it from scratch to get her back in business, it is the only
thing that stops her from standing on my doorstep with kids in tow
saying she has nowhere to live!
Once it is back up can she download it, i.e. is there a tool that will
download a complete web site, pictures and all, for future security? It
sounds a bit hacky but she can't risk being in this position again.

HTTrack.

If she has access to her file space on the server, what's wrong with FTP?

[Abandoned Trolley]

Post by GB
HTTrack.
If she has access to her file space on the server, what's wrong with FTP?

"has been hacked and, effectively deleted" ...

[GB]

Post by Abandoned Trolley

Post by GB
HTTrack.
If she has access to her file space on the server, what's wrong with FTP?

"has been hacked and, effectively deleted" ...

"Once it is back up can she download it"

[Theo]

Post by Jeff Gaines
Once it is back up can she download it, i.e. is there a tool that will
download a complete web site, pictures and all, for future security? It
sounds a bit hacky but she can't risk being in this position again.

Most websites nowadays are programmatically generated. In other words you
don't write HTML in a text editor like 1990s, you write words into an admin
web page which stores them in a database. When somebody views the page the
software retrieves the content for the database and adds appropriate HTML
around it. Typically all the headings, menus, navigation, etc are added by
the Content Management System that's generating the HTML, as well as
features like comments, shopping carts, etc.

If you use a download tool like wget you get the HTML, but it's then a job
to reconstruct the DB - basically you have to copy out the text and create a
new page in the CMS web UI with the paste of the old page. That's almost as
much work as building the site from scratch.

Instead, you should check what the web host offers in terms of backups. If
you can backup the database itself, rather than the generated pages, then
you can restore it and its config and the website will be back up and
running again. Databases aren't files so you can't get at them via FTP, you
need to go into the control panel and make backups - those backups are then
files you download from the control panel or probably can pull via FTP.


BTW, she may find it useful to look up the website on archives like
https://web.archive.org/ and see if they have a capture of how it used to
be. It's only the static HTML and images so she'd then have to reconstruct
it on a new host as per my second paragraph. But easier than starting from
nothing.

Theo

[Jeff Gaines]

Post by Jeff Gaines
My daughter's website has been hacked and, effectively deleted. The
company that maintains it and arranges hosting has said hers was the only
target and that on checking their system the only one out off all the
sites they manage that has never been backed up.

Many thanks for all the input :-)

Work is under way to rebuild the site which is the first priority, there
was indeed a copy on https://web.archive.org/ - thanks Theo.

Once she's up and running we'll go into why there was no backup, assuming
it is dynamically presented from a database (I think it,s built on
something called Shopping Cart) it does seem odd that was the only one not
backed up.

Thanks again!

[Vir Campestris]

Post by Jeff Gaines
It never rains....
My daughter's website has been hacked and, effectively deleted. The
company that maintains it and arranges hosting has said hers was the
only target and that on checking their system the only one out off all
the sites they manage that has never been backed up.
Obviously questions to be answered for the future but they are re-
building it from scratch to get her back in business, it is the only
thing that stops her from standing on my doorstep with kids in tow
saying she has nowhere to live!
Once it is back up can she download it, i.e. is there a tool that will
download a complete web site, pictures and all, for future security? It
sounds a bit hacky but she can't risk being in this position again.
The
company that maintains it and arranges hosting has said hers was the
only target and that on checking their system the only one out off all
the sites they manage that has never been backed up.

Yeah right. They just happened to hit the only one that wasn't backed
up. And I'm Father Christmas.

As others have said switch providers ASAP.

Andy