If there’s one thing that’s guaranteed in the tech world it’s that nothing is guaranteed. From AOL, Netscape, Yahoo, and MySpace, every tech empire seems to eventually fall to ruin. One method to reliably maintain information or online experiences that are lost to whims of computer users and markets is to backup, preserve, and host that information on one’s own computers, and the Kiwix project aims to help make offline backups of favorite websites.
The open-source tool started as a way for users to make their own offline backups of Wikipedia but eventually expanded into having the ability to backup many other sites as well. Wiki-type sites are generally the easiest, but it can also create backups of other sites like StackExchange so that when the Internet goes down or the site vanishes from the world, the information is preserved for use. There are plenty of guides online for setting up Kiwix as well, with it running easily on most Linux systems with or without the help of Docker, as well as versions available for Windows, Android, and Apple platforms.
Although the Kiwix software hosts the website backups, creating the backups needs to be done with another tool called Zimit to create the .zim files Kiwix uses. The Kiwix organization also hosts pre-downloaded .zim files of common websites so each user is not independently crawling Wikipedia on their own, a task that could take months on limited consumer hardware. As for what hardware to ultimately host it on, we might recommend an armageddon-proof machine like this one.
