Documentation

Crawl files

Where your crawls are saved, how to open older ones, and how to pass a crawl to a colleague.

Every crawl is a file

BumbleCrawl saves each crawl as a single file on your computer, with everything it found: every URL, link, header, check result and, if you turned them on, the HTML and screenshots. Nothing is uploaded anywhere, and there is no account.

The files live in BumbleCrawl's data folder, one subfolder per site:

  • Windows: %APPDATA%\BumbleCrawl\data\crawls
  • macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/BumbleCrawl/data/crawls

Include that folder in your backup to keep your crawl history. A crawl of a few thousand pages takes a few megabytes; storing the HTML of every page makes files much larger.

Open an earlier crawl

File›Open crawl… lists all saved crawls, newest first, with the site, the date and the number of URLs. File›Recent crawls has the last few.

The Open crawl dialog: three crawls of theenglishgarden.co.uk with their start time and number of URLs, each with an Open button.

Older crawls stay readable after updates: BumbleCrawl upgrades a crawl file when it opens it. New checks that need data the old crawl didn't collect stay empty until you crawl again.

Pass a crawl on

  • File›Export crawl file… saves a copy of the open crawl, e.g. to send to a colleague or a client.
  • File›Import crawl file… adds a crawl file to the crawls of its site and opens it. The original file stays untouched.

Crawl files never contain passwords: the password for HTTP authentication, the values of credential headers and the cookies of a login stay in your settings. See Crawl behind a login.

To compare a crawl someone sent you with your own, import it and switch to compare mode. For tables instead of a whole crawl, use Export (see Exports and reports).