Gotta agree that it's really darn confusing as to what this thing actually does. Seems like a pretty big project that some talented people have poured a lot of time into, but what am I getting into here?

Does it (1) download archived urls already on archive.org locally? or (2) spider websites I choose from scratch and save them locally (or on archive.org??)

Totally unclear. These are very different things. Want to install and try it but also a little wary given the opacity of explanation about the basic functionality and purpose of the tool!

Why is this better than simply passing a cURL such as archive.today/example.com/post1

> Chromium: Wayback uses a headless Chromium to capture web pages for archiving purposes. [0]

I think it is a local spider. This quote is the only clear indication that they actually spider themselves. There are lots of implicit statements as well.

[0] https://docs.wabarc.eu.org/installation/

Correct, wayback has implemented remote and local archiving of various types of resources, including HTML, PDF, HAR, WARC, Readability (Markdown and Txt), and media files such as images, videos, and audio.

I think that if you use the IPFS option, you can pin the generated files so you have them locally.