The HTTrack Website Copier allows users to download the whole of a website from the internet. HTTrack uses the same recursive method that current search engine deploy to crawl the internet websites. And the recursive gathering consists of building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the remote server to your local computer.

HTTrack Website Copier starts a default wizard and asks the user to start a new project or resume an old one.  New project creation leads to a smooth experience for the user. The wizard asks for Project name, category and base path where the downloaded website should be saved.

The wizard leads to mirroring mode which requires few important options like actions and URL to setup. Preferences and mirror functionalities include advanced options to mirror the webpage. There are 7 actions to choose from including resuming the past mirroring options. Users can also provide URL list stored in .txt format.

Advance options include proxy options, scan rules, limits and many more. The Scan Rules take care of advance scanning by using regular expressions and also selecting type of image, compression and audio or video format to save. Scan Rules also have an option to exclude and include links manually based on different criteria.

Limits tab in preference and mirror options, provide a set of metrics to control the flow of data. Flow control features number of connection, timeout settings, retires and minimum transfer rate in bytes/sec. It also has a checkbox to discard any hosts that have very low transfer rate.

Links tab hosts options to detect links and check validity of external links. Users can also use non-html files like .zip or picture and override to get HTML files first. Build tab provides options on how the local structure type should be like either retaining the original site-structure or downloading in separate folders according to option chosen by user. Spider tab features the crawling options including the option to make the tool allow robot.txt rules while downloading or ignore them. Users can also choose to accept cookies and parse java files.

The other options are Mime types, Browser ID, log, index, cache and Expert Only. Expert Only tab should be used with caution as it includes options that changes the behavior of the tool considerably. The users can also choose to disconnect or shutdown the project when finished. Users can also hold the time when there would be no activity, enabling scheduling project easily.