Add official support for taking multiple snapshots of websites over time

This is by far the most requested feature.

People want an easy way to take multiple snapshots of websites over time.

This will be easier to do once we’ve added pywb support since we’ll be able to use timestamped de-duped WARCs to save each snapshot: #130

For people finding this issue via Google / incoming links, if you want a hacky solution to take a second snapshot of a site, you can add the link with a new hash and it will be treated as a new page and a new snapshot will be taken:

echo https://example.com/some/page.html#archivedate=2019-03-18 | archivebox add
# then to re-shapshot it on another day...
echo https://example.com/some/page.html#archivedate=2019-03-22 | archivebox add

Edit: as of v0.6 there is now a button in the UI to do this ^

[pirate]

This is now added in v0.6. It’s not full support, but it’s a step in the right direction. I just added a UI button labeled Re-snapshot that automates the process of creating a new snapshot with a bumped timestamp in the URL hash. I could also add a flag called --resnapshot or --duplicate that automates this step when archiving via the CLI too.

Then later when we add better real multi-snapshot support, we can migrate all the Snapshots with timestamps in their hashes to the new system automatically.

[pirate]

You can accomplish this right now still by adding a hash at the end of the URL, e.g.

archivebox add https://example.com/#2020-08-01
archivebox add https://example.com/#2020-09-01
...

Official first-class support for multiple snapshots is still on the roadmap, but don’t expect it anytime in the next month or two, it’s quite a large feature with big implications for how we store and dedupe snapshot data internally.