How to turn your whole website into a single WARC file you can replay in your browser

Published Oct 24, 2026, 1:30 PM EDT Former radio and TV guy (I Heart Radio and PBS). Now a writer, researcher, and musician who writes about the absurdity of our modern world and other offbeat topics. Specializes in weird music, the old web, retro video games and tech, and researching strange, yet interesting things. His work has appeared in Vice, Tedium, Star Trek.com, Today I Found Out, Typebar, SyFy Wire, and How To Geek. Currently working on a variety of music, web, and writing projects. Visit him on the web at https://djbuckfreelance.neocities.org/. I'm an ardent supporter of archiving things. The Internet Archive and Wayback Machine are two of my most frequented places online. As I was researching something earlier this year, I stumbled upon something I (surprisingly) hadn't heard of before: the WARC format. These things are one of the most fascinating files/formats I've come across since Ogg Vorbis. And I wanted to learn more about what they are and how to use them. WARC is a useful and complex format It's the most heavy-duty archive format around Everyone knows that multiple copies keep your content safe, right? WARC, or Web Archive, format is built for that, but in a major way. Developed through the International Internet Preservation Consortium (with some help from Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle and Mike Burner), it was meant to be a way to use a single file to move or store a massive amount of unrestricted constituent data objects. The idea was to preserve websites in their entirety while maintaining their files, function, metadata, and integrity. That's a pretty lofty goal and only makes the Internet Archive's work that much more impressive and important. According to its official specifications, it's a container that holds other file types and keeps web content preserved in its original form/context. The files are huge, and they can be moved safely. WARC files are mostly used to store web crawl data. The format has been around since 2007, evolving from the ARC format, used to store web crawl data (my favorite place on the internet, The Internet Archive, originally created ARC before transitioning to WARC). It's what you might call a heavy-duty archive. Think of it like an album. You have an album name and jacket/cover art, with a tracklist full of content. WARC files are similar to that. There's a header (album title) and content block (the tracks) for each record stored in the Archive. And WARC files use a lot of records. Headers are named fields, while content blocks contain the website content, like the HTML files and multimedia. Two versions of the format exist: ISO 28500:2007, or WARC 1.0, and ISO 28500:2017, AKA WARC 1.1. The main difference between the two is pretty simple. 1.1 resolves an issue where brackets had to be around the WARC-Target-URI (URI stands for Uniform Resource Identifier). The International Internet Preservation Consortium is responsible for maintaining the WARC standard. The sheer scale of the data involved is impressive, and I wondered how they're typically being used. It turns out the user base isn't as small as you might think. It's useful for libraries and archivists And a lot of organizations in between According to a 7-year old Reddit thread, the only real use for WARC seems to be uploading to the Internet Archive and playing things back on the Wayback Machine. That's not exactly accurate, at least in 2026. We already know they're a big part of the Internet Archive. The Library of Congress also uses WARC format to store web archives. They're also used by law firms, regular libraries, museums, and most likely anywhere extensive research is being done. But the most fascinating thing about them is that you can make your own and read it quite easily with specialized tools. Turn your website into a WARC file It only takes a few minutes After learning more about the files, I wanted to see how easy it would be to make one. It seems more complicated than it actually is. There's no single secret or special tool that just makes a WARC file. But there are plenty of tools for working with WARC files available to create and access them. The Archive Team has some useful information about what works and what doesn't. It seems like the best tools to use are the Internet Archive's own Heretrix for the web crawl and Wayback Machine for playback. There are other options available, like the WARC tools or the WARC Python library, depending on your comfort/skill level. I've read that wget used to be a good way to generate WARC files, but it doesn't work for it now. As of 2024, however, at least one person did have success with it. I tried their script for my own website, and it worked. I just changed the info under warc-file to “site backup” and added my URL at the bottom of the command. I named it neocities-backup and used wget in Termux on my home lab Android phone to archive my site. It gave me a file called neocities-backup.warc.gz. From there, I used this command to move it to local storage: cp neocities-backup.warc.gz ~/storage/downloads After you create it, the file comes back as a gzip (gz) because that's the compression utility used for the WARC standard. To play it back, you need a special web page or tool. I used replayweb.page. All I had to do was load the WARC file into the browser. It loaded it up, and I was able to search through all of the assets. I checked out some images, an MP3, and went through a few of my pages. It was quite fun to mess around with it. I think this is a useful way to archive things. And while it may not have a practical use outside of that, I'd say give it a try with your own website so you can see the power of the WARC format in action. Archiving and preservation are more vital than ever The Mad Scientist in me wanting to try using WARC files with Obsidian is what piqued my interest in the format. That might not be the best thing to do. But I'm definitely interested in learning more about archiving, and maybe one day I can join an ongoing archival effort. WARC and formats like it are endlessly fascinating, and it's always worth seeing how these specialized formats are used.