A capture drives a real browser, waits for the page to settle, and writes a single document with every stylesheet, image and font embedded and every script removed. It opens offline, anywhere, for as long as you keep it.
Most pages take a minute or two. You do not have to wait on the page: progress updates in place, and a notification arrives when the capture lands.
The address, and every redirect after it, is checked. Private, loopback and link-local destinations are refused.
Headless Chromium loads the page. A recognised consent banner is answered with its own accept button.
The browser waits for loading to finish, so content further down the page is fetched too.
SingleFile embeds every stylesheet, image and font, prunes unused CSS and strips all scripts.
The preview is taken from the saved file, not the live page, so a broken capture looks broken on day one.
| File | Made from | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| .html | The live page | The archive itself. Self-contained, script-free, opens offline. |
| .jpg | The saved file | Recognition and proof. Shows the capture kept its styling. |
| .txt | The saved file | Reading and quoting. Headings, lists, tables and link targets kept. |
| .warc.gz | All of the above | Interchange. WARC 1.1 for other archiving tools. |
| .json | All of the above | Audit. A size and SHA-256 digest for every file, plus the tools and times behind it. |
A cookie banner is the usual reason a capture records nothing useful. It covers the page, and most lock scrolling while they are up, so the content below the fold never loads.
A failure another try could get past, such as a timeout or a host that did not resolve, is retried automatically. Only the last failure raises an alert. A failure no retry can fix is reported at once.
| Status | Means |
|---|---|
| Queued | Waiting its turn, or waiting to try again. |
| Running | A browser is on the page now. |
| Complete | Stored. The only status with files. |
| Failed | The record says what went wrong. |
| Canceled | You stopped it. Nothing was written. |
Requests you make by hand go ahead of scheduled work.
The progress card says which attempt failed, why, and when the next starts.
If this fails too, you get one alert, and an email for a scheduled capture.
Create an account on the free tier, paste an address, and see the snapshot land in your archive.