Johnny_Walker asks about archiving Discourse forum content for long-term preservation, as their site will be taken down. They want a simple .zip or .gzip file to store locally. simon responds by explaining that Discourse backups are for restoration, not archiving, and points to a discussion on archival tools. simon also notes that appending ?_escaped_fragment_ to a topic URL can generate a basic HTML version, suggesting a possible method to scrape and save topics as HTML files.
I know there’s a document on creating backups of your Discourse forum, but I’d like to backup my forum content for an extended period – my site is going to be taken down for the foreseeable future. The discussions there have been really interesting and I’d like them to be preserved, and possibly resurrected at some point.
I just want a simple .zip or .gzip file that I can store locally until the day comes. Is this possible? Every option on Discourse appears to be about maintaining backups, rather than archiving.
The easiest approach is to create a backup file that you can restore to another Discourse forum at a later time.
There is a discussion about archiving Discourse here: A basic Discourse archival tool. Be sure to read this post in the topic. Clicking the link in that post will show you that you can get a basic HTML version of a Discourse topic by appending ?_escaped_fragment_ to the topic’s URL. It could be possible to use that approach to scrape a site’s HTML and then save the site’s topics to a directory of HTML files.