Right now, I have a mess of bookmarks, open tabs, and things saved haphazardly in different apps. I want a system where I can organize it all and also keep it reasonably private. Open to all suggestions, whether that’s an app or a tool or a personal trick or some completely different way of interacting with the internet.
I use raindrop primarily as a cross platform bookmarker and personal archiver, as the paid plan saves backups of web pages. Just save + add tags for anything I read and may want to refer to later. Tags + free text search makes finding things easy. I don’t worry about folders/collections because the goal is speed.
Raindrop only archives public sites like a crawler though, so it often fails due to captchas or paywalls.
I also use the SingleFile browser extension and screenshots to archive amything I’m logged into locally. Recoll indexes them for easy searching.
I’ve been planning to test out ArchiveBox but the current approach works well enough.
Hi, just to clarify: If you want to save something that’s behind a paywall/captcha but you’re paying for it or have access to it, can you screenshot it and then move it into Raindrop? Or do you just have to use a separate bookmarker/archiver for that stuff?
You could screenshot or SingleFile it and save it in raindrop manually, but I wouldn’t do that for PII-related records. I use SingleFile to save interactions with businesses, account snapshots, and other things that would get lost in the ether, but I would never upload those anywhere without client side encryption.
SingleFile can be configured to save directly to ArchiveBox and other backends. Recoll has its own browser extension that can index everything you search locally.
They all have tradeoffs. That’s why ArchiveBox has several methods for archiving. Screenshots are a 1:1 visual copy but have size limits, and are an expensive way to archive without heavy compression. SingleFile does not work sometimes (ebay listings), or are huge with poorly optimised or image heavy sites, but issues can often be fixed in tweaking settings. Some formats are hard to read on mobile, or harder to index, etc. If someone who works at a computer used Recoll, I suspect the index would get very large, very fast, but it would certainly be useful for a focused research/work/study browser archive.