‘Copying Websites’

The best ‘internet explorer’ option would be to create a ‘favorite’ and tick ‘Make Available offline’. Click customise and it will give you some options as to how many links ‘deep’ you want to go.

A better free tool for this would be HTTRACK, which is highly configurable and is completely open source, so the support is there.

All of this depends entirely on what the copy of the website will be used for, (i.e. evidence, reference etc) and how dynamic the website is. (i.e. imagine trying to ‘copy’ yahoo. Each individual user has their own settings that can dynamically change based on preferences. Using most of the methods suggested would only result in your ‘version’ of the website being copied.) The only true way to copy a website (especially a complex dynamic one) would be to image all of the servers (content, databases, images etc) so the site can be recreated on other servers. It may be possible to retrieve back up tapes from the servers which will contain this information.

So, the key to what you do depends on the type of site. If its static its easy, if its dynamic, it can be hard depending on what you want.