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The more I use Stack Exchange, the more it is getting a knowledge base for me, that I don't want to loose again ever. So in case SE will seize to exist one day, I would like to backup all my work.

I bookmark all questions that I need for later reference. Now I want to store these pages locally on my laptop.

It is really time-consuming:

  • I could use Ctrl+S on each favorite question page

On Linux:

There could be a solution with

wget -N -r -l 1 "https://stackoverflow.com/users/1069083/rubo77?tab=favorites"

This will download all bookmarked questions, but it doesn't create any correct index.html file.

Another approach would be to use the Stack Exchange-accounts-tab to automatically follow into all your Stack Exchange accounts.

But that would have to be somehow limited to only bookmark links on your bookmark tab on each Stack Exchange site.

Cross-platform:

You would need a Firefox plugin that downloads links recursively, but only within the bookmarks tab of your profile.

Additionally, I would like to Download all my activity in a browsable form and Mirror all Stack Exchange pages where you were active

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  • 1
    have you considered using pocket or some similar service?
    – cregox
    Aug 4, 2014 at 14:00
  • How about you just download the whole internet? There really is no point in taking all these pages offline, how often are you going to update your downloads for example. The benefit here is that because they are online, they get new insights and updates every now and then, things you miss out on when you download them.
    – Luuklag
    Jul 16, 2021 at 7:40
  • Can you share more info about why you need access offline or what your offline use-case is so that we might better answer? Thanks!
    – webmarc
    Jul 16, 2021 at 12:56
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    @Webmarc: I edited my question. It is for backup
    – rubo77
    Jul 16, 2021 at 13:41
  • I actually think your wget/curl solution gets you what want if you are ok with either 1) using your os's indexing ability or 2) considering creation of index.html tech debt that you don't need to pay until needed. Also consider: wayback machine.
    – webmarc
    Jul 16, 2021 at 16:53

2 Answers 2

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There is a data.SE query which provides a CSV export of favorites:

https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/137288/favorites-text

And there's a Stack App which provides a single page view of all Stack Overflow favorites:

OBSOLETE - Stack Favorites: A basic organizer of your Stack Overflow favorites

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  • That app 'Stack Favorites' doesn't offer an offlline storage, it only manages the links to the favorites, but not the content of the pages
    – rubo77
    Nov 19, 2015 at 10:48
  • And the query only offers an export to one site, for example only "StackOverflow" it is no solution to download all favorites from all sites
    – rubo77
    Nov 19, 2015 at 10:51
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+50

It's possible to write a Stack Exchange Data Explorer query which exports the desired information for all bookmarked questions by a particular user (including, but not limited to, yourself). I wrote this one which exports the body of all bookmarked questions and their answers, plus some metadata like tags, score and creation date; feel free to fork it to your own needs. SEDE has built-in CSV export functionality. You'll still need to write a script to generate a final HTML file, but the ingredients are there.

enter image description here

An alternative solution would be use SEDE to generate a list of shell commands, like this:

enter image description here

This way, you can do the archiving yourself. You might need to implement some pauses to avoid being rate limited, but that also depends on your internet connection speed and the length of the list.

Please keep in mind SEDE is updated only once a week, on Sunday morning.

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  • I'd rather have an HTML copy of the original sites, because also the extra info, like the links to related questions and so on are interesting to backup
    – rubo77
    Jul 16, 2021 at 13:44
  • @rubo77 could you try my updated solution? I never use wget, only curl ...
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Jul 16, 2021 at 14:01

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