Jean is an Internet and Multimedia specialist with a keen interest in music, technology, business, sports and psychology.
Jean Galea
Internet Consultant in Malta
Jean Galea: entrepreneur and internet specialist. Holding an M.Sc. in Multimedia & Internet Computing from Loughborough University, Jean specialises in web design and development, email marketing systems and general internet consultancy.
How to save your Yahoo Geocities website to your hard drive
Following the recent announcement that Yahoo will be closing down the Geocities free hosting service, many people are asking how they can easily transfer their Geocities website files to their hard drive so that they can keep a copy and then transfer it to a new web host.
There is a manual way which involves logging into your Geocities account and viewing the source of each file, copying and pasting into a notepad file and saving that file. This is of course very labour intensive, especially when your website has tens and hundreds of files.
In order to easily take a backup of my site, I needed something easier and faster, so I used a program called WinHttrack.
Follow these simple steps and you should be all set with a version of your Yahoo Geocities website on your hard drive:
- Just download the sofware, which is free, and install on your PC.
- Run HTTrack, give a name to your project and choose a place on your computer where the files will be saved. Click ‘Next’.
- Copy and paste the address of your Geocities website from your browser into HTTrack’s ‘Web Addresses’ field.
- Click the ‘Set options…’ button, then select the ‘Limits’ tab and set the ‘Max transfer rate’ to 1000B/s. This will avoid getting a bandwidth exceeded error from Geocities.
- Go back to the previous window and click ‘Next’.
- On the last screen click on ‘Finish’, and the downloading process will commence.
- Watch happily as all your website files get copied and test it out when the process is finished. It worked beautifully for me
If you have any questions just leave a comment and I’ll do my best to help out.
This is the official email sent by Yahoo to the subscribers of its Geocities services:
Dear Yahoo! GeoCities customer,
We’re writing to let you know that Yahoo! GeoCities, our free web site building service and community, is closing on October 26, 2009.
On October 26, 2009, your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and files.
What You Need to Do
If you’d like to move your web site, or save the images and other files you’ve posted online, you need to act now by choosing one of the following options:
Move your site to Yahoo! Web Hosting.
We know your files are important to you, and we want to make moving to Web Hosting as easy and affordable as we can. For a limited time, you can move your files automatically, take advantage of terrific features like a personalized domain name and email, even redirect your GeoCities web address to your new site — all for only $4.99 a month for a full year.
For more information and complete terms, please see our special offer now.
Download your files to your own computer.
With your pages and images saved offline, you can re-create your site with any hosting provider.To quickly download your published files, visit your GeoCities web site, right-click on each page, and choose Save Page As… from the menu that appears. Choose a location on your computer to save your files, then click OK or Save. Learn more about downloading your files.
Don’t Wait
Please be aware that after October 26, your GeoCities files will be deleted from our servers, and will not be recoverable. If you’d like to save your files, you must download them now or move to Yahoo! Web Hosting. If you need assistance, please visit the help center.
We want to thank you for being a GeoCities customer, and hope you continue to enjoy our other Yahoo! services.
Best regards,
The Yahoo! GeoCities team
Related posts:
- Special offer for people migrating from Yahoo Geocities
- How to integrate your WordPress blog with Facebook
- Automated CPanel Backups for multiple sites
- Setting up WordPress Virtual Hosts with XAMPP
- Using Gmail as a hard disk drive
17 Responses to “How to save your Yahoo Geocities website to your hard drive”
Leave a Reply
Thank you for reading this blog. Please check back for new posts.
Categories
Links
Search
© Jean Galea · 
RSS Feed
· Sitemap
· Hosting by IHostMalta
hey there!
thank you so much for providing this link. you saved my 6 years of blog entries. lame, i know, but the amount it mattered to me nobody can understand. and the painstaking task of having to save those entries individually would have taken me to my grave.
thanks so much!
Glad you found it useful, thanks for leaving a comment!
Hi Jean,
You have a good program there, but I think my website is just too large to download with it. The best I have done was 2.23 MB, but then I kept getting ‘site unavailable’ error messages in the log. Guess I exceeded my allowed bandwidth all in one shot. I even trimmed down my home page, to eliminate the extra links, but that didn’t help.
Oddly enough, I was able to download 13.9 MB earlier this morning using the Firefox App ‘Downthemall’, from within File Manager.
Regards,
Brian M.
I did some research after reading this blog and about the problem Brian was having. Geocities bandwidth limit is roughly 5 megabytes per hour, which, if you set the download limit in WinHttrack to 1000 Bs (1kB/s), you will not exceed the limit.
Thanks Jean for a solution to the problem of saving my geocities site. WinHttrack is working great.
Yes excellent pf100 that is the solution that will enable you to download your complete site without any bandwidth problems with geocities. Hope other people can find it useful. I will amend the instructions accordingly.
Having trouble with this method…followed the instructions but getting error message…can anyone assist? Thanks!!
HTTrack3.43-7+htsswf+htsjava launched on Tue, 25 Aug 2009 13:12:03 at http://www.geocities.com/chanadafilms/ +*.png +*.gif +*.jpg +*.css +*.js -ad.doubleclick.net/* -mime:application/foobar
(winhttrack -qYC2%Ps2u1%s%uN0%I0p3DaK0H0%kf2A1000%f#f -F “Mozilla/4.5 (compatible; HTTrack 3.0x; Windows 98)” -%F “” -%l “en, en, *” -Y http://www.geocities.com/chanadafilms/ -O1 “d:\data\762393932\My Documents\My Pictures\Chanadafilms\Chanadafilms” +*.png +*.gif +*.jpg +*.css +*.js -ad.doubleclick.net/* -mime:application/foobar )
Information, Warnings and Errors reported for this mirror:
note: the hts-log.txt file, and hts-cache folder, may contain sensitive information,
such as username/password authentication for websites mirrored in this project
do not share these files/folders if you want these information to remain private
13:12:03 Warning: Cache: damaged cache, trying to repair
13:12:03 Warning: Cache: 0 bytes successfully recovered in 0 entries
13:12:03 Warning: Cache: error trying to open the cache
13:12:03 Error: “Connect Error” (-4) after 2 retries at link http://www.geocities.com/robots.txt (from primary/primary)
13:12:04 Error: “Connect Error” (-4) after 2 retries at link http://www.geocities.com/chanadafilms/ (from primary/primary)
13:12:04 Info: No data seems to have been transfered during this session! : restoring previous one!
very good post, you should post more stuff like to this.
@Chanada I’ve just tried downloading your website and it worked fine for me, are you still having problems?
Thanks for checking jpgalea…Unfortunately, I am still receiving same “mirror” error message when I attempt to download my website…darn!
Hmm I’m sorry I can’t replicate the same error message from my end so I cannot really help you out any further, hope you manage to make it work, maybe you can ask on some IT forum, where folks might have a deeper knowledge of httrack.
Wow, worker perfectly.
I was weeks before I stumbled unto your site.
Thanks
Tom
Glad it worked for you Tom
I can not get the program to download all the filles. It will download the main but will not go to any sub folders? What am I doing wrong
@Charles Try changing the ‘Maximum mirroring depth’ setting (make it higher), under the ‘Limits’ tab in the options window.
The options window is accessible just below the box where you enter the web addresses you want to backup, there is a button tagged as ‘Set Options…’
Great read, I emailed this post to my friend in Indiana, bookmarked this for future reference too.
Thank you for this well written article.
neat great website yea nice job our website will soon be adding reviews on websites and add them to our websites as the top best 50 blogs to visit we also do reviews on Customer Reviews all types of reviews thank you