Mirror mirror on the wall, what’s the best onion backup of them all?

As everyone knows, many Tor onion sites are very short-lived, and whilst you might find something interesting one day, you may return the next week to find not only is it down, but there are no mirrors and the content is simply gone for good.

Under these circumstances people like turn to personal testimonial that they once saw such-and-such and because they neither bookmarked the site or even created screen shots, that they have to be believed.

No one has to be believed.

The following are two useful ways to backup onion sites.

Archive.is

Archive.is is a popular website mirroring service, suitable for backing up small mostly static websites for free. Since it can’t access Tor natively, you’ll need a Tor2Web service like onion.link or onion.to. You may want to perform the following actions entirely from Tor if you’re concerned about your privacy here.

For this example we will use Bitcoin Fog located at http://foggeddriztrcar2.onion/

First I check the site is up and working. Next I convert it to a Tor2Web link and check that is working too, in this case https://foggeddriztrcar2.onion.to/

Finally I pass this to archive.is. If it already has a snapshot of the site it will ask if I want to update the snapshot. Finally, it produces a URL which is both reliable and easy to share:

http://archive.is/FZOhJ

Because the information is stored on an online service, it provides some evidence that the snapshot is true and not been tampered with.

Mirroring tools

Another method for mirroring sites involves using specialised software or tools for the job. The popular GNU tool wget has a large amount of native support for website mirroring, meaning you don’t need to mess around with commercial tools if you don’t want to.

If you’re on windows, you’ll need to download something like cygwin to allow use of unix tools.

Now if you need to do this most anonymously, you’ll need to configure your main internet connection to use Tor, which is to way more configuration that just using the Tor Browser bundle. However if you don’t mind your ISP being able to see the site you’re backing up, then you can again use a Tor2Web version of the url.

Create a temporary directory and run the following command:

The switches in question tell wget to mirror, konvert links to local versions, save original non-Konverted files, and adjust Extensions to .html files.

$ ls -l

total 153

drwxr-xr-x+ 1 local None 0 Apr 30 00:38 antanistaticmap

-rw-r — r — 1 local None 7556 Apr 30 00:38 favicon.ico.html

-rw-r — r — 1 local None 7559 Jan 6 00:19 favicon.ico.orig

-rw-r — r — 1 local None 10712 Apr 30 00:38 index.html

-rw-r — r — 1 local None 10660 Apr 30 00:38 index.html.orig

-rw-r — r — 1 local None 10712 Apr 30 00:38 ‘[email protected]=index.html’

-rw-r — r — 1 local None 10660 Apr 30 00:38 ‘[email protected]=index.orig’

-rw-r — r — 1 local None 10712 Apr 30 00:38 ‘[email protected]=logout.html’

-rw-r — r — 1 local None 10660 Apr 30 00:38 ‘[email protected]=logout.orig’

-rw-r — r — 1 local None 23177 Apr 30 00:38 ‘[email protected]=register.html’

-rw-r — r — 1 local None 23111 Apr 30 00:38 ‘[email protected]=register.orig’

-rw-r — r — 1 local None 8416 Apr 30 00:38 ‘[email protected]=showcaptcha&captchaid=EQziWkPcZp’

-rw-r — r — 1 local None 75 Apr 30 00:38 robots.txt

drwxr-xr-x+ 1 local None 0 Apr 30 00:38 static

The script should crawl entire sites and hopefully create a fully functional local mirror.

Because all the information is saved locally, it is impossible to prove it has not been tampered with unfortunately, but it’s useful for your own study purposes.

Conclusions

These tools should allow you to backup and share all kinds of onion links you come across. Never hear tales of ‘creepy links’ again — demand the content!