How To: Download an Entire Website using Teleport Pro
Websites change constantly, sometimes disappearing from the internet entirely when the owner loses interest or financial backing. When this happens, the chances of accessing the information that was once stored there are significantly reduced.
Teleport Pro is an application designed to work around the fluid nature of the internet. It allows you to take a local snapshot of any website and store it so it can be viewed even without an internet connection. When the original site is modified, or even removed, the local copy can be used as an alternative source.
To learn how to use Teleport Pro to download an entire website for offline viewing, run through the steps in our simple guide.
Step-by-Step Instructions
- 1
Access the related download link for this article and grab the installer file for Teleport Pro. Once this has finished downloading, locate the file in your downloads folder and run it to kick off the installation process. Follow the on-screen prompts throughout installation.
- 2
Click the Windows Start button and locate Teleport Pro in your list of programs. Click the Teleport Pro entry to launch the application. The Teleport Pro interface, when it first appears, contains two empty panels and a typical Windows toolbar.
- 3
Click File and choose New Project Wizard. Select Create a Browsable Copy of a Website On My Hard Drive and click Next.
- 4
Enter the full URL of a website you wish to clone on your hard drive. It is strongly advised not to use Teleport Pro to download very large websites such as Wikipedia, as this will take a long time and will exert considerable load on the web server(s). Note that many commercial sites will also block crawling, which means Teleport Pro will not work with them. For this reason, it is best used with smaller, non-commercial homepages containing useful information that you would like to preserve.
- 5
Enter the depth of links for Teleport Pro to explore when it analyses the specified site. For example, entering 3 will instruct Teleport Pro to explore 3 levels of sub-pages for links, but no further. Click Next to continue.
- 6
Specify what page elements should be captured - Just Text, Text and Graphics, Text/Graphics/Sound or Everything. Note that the more data object types you choose to capture, the longer the download process will take and the larger the "backup" files will be in size. If the site requires a log-in then you can also enter the credentials on this screen. Click Next to continue.
- 7
Click Finish to close the wizard. Save the project by entering a file name, choosing a location on your hard drive and clicking Save.
- 8
Click the Start button on the toolbar to proceed with the analysis and backup of the chosen website. In the main window, details of the files that are being backed up are shown. Depending on the size of the specified website and the elements you chose to capture, this process will vary in duration. When it is completed, the message Project Saved... appears at the bottom of the Teleport Pro interface.
- 9
To view the webpage offline, locate the project folder where all the backup files are stored (the location you selected in Step 7) and open the homepage using your web-browser. The homepage will usually be called index.htm or similar. Simply right-click the file and choose Open With, then select your web browser.
Tips & Advice
- Teleport Pro is not able to capture rich media such as embedded sound and video.
- If you want to save just a single web-page, most browsers offer this functionality just by using the Save Page As functionality. Access your browsers menu, choose Save Page As and select HTML document. The page can then be viewed offline. Note that images and text are the only media captured using this method.
