Backup Actor

What does Backup Actor do?

Backup Actor is a bridge between India's e-paper readers and your own systems. Every e-paper site hides its pages behind its own viewer: tiles, fragments, page maps, readers that only ever show a screen at a time. Backup Actor goes through each viewer the way it was built to be read, gathers every page of the edition, rebuilds it, and hands you one clean PDF per edition, ready to flow into your archive, your monitoring desk or your pipeline.

138 titles and editions. 12 languages. One call.

The architecture

Moving a newspaper from a publisher's reader into your system is not one download. It is hundreds of requests across an unreliable public internet, any one of which can stall, drop or come back damaged. Backup Actor treats every edition as a transfer that must arrive whole, and runs it through a layered pipeline:

1. Discovery layer. Locates the edition for your date inside the publisher's own reader and maps every page, supplement and pull-out in true reading order.

2. Extraction layer. Pulls each page at the highest resolution the reader serves, many pages in parallel over one pooled connection.

3. Resilience layer. The internet is not reliable, so the pipeline never assumes it is:

• Network faults (dropped connections, timeouts, lag spikes, a server that stops answering mid-page) are caught and the request is sent again automatically.
• Exponential back-off with jitter spaces the retries out, so a struggling server gets room to recover instead of a flood.
• Rate-limit awareness: when a publisher asks for patience (429, Retry-After), the pipeline waits exactly as asked, then resumes.
• Fault isolation: one failing page never stops its edition, and one failing edition never stops the run.

4. Reconstruction layer. Rebuilds what readers serve in pieces: tiled pages are stitched back into whole pages, low-resolution pages are rebuilt from their full-resolution article crops, and where the publisher offers its own press PDF, that original is kept with its vector text intact. Images are embedded losslessly, never re-compressed.

5. Integrity layer. Before anything is delivered, every page is accounted for: page counts are checked against the publisher's own listing, thumbnail-sized images are caught, and odd formats are normalised. An edition missing even one page is marked partial, never passed off as complete. No broken editions, no silent gaps.

6. Delivery layer. The verified pages are bound into a single PDF and handed to you with a direct link, ready for your archive, your monitoring desk or your pipeline.

Why teams use it

• Morning-ready: schedule it and every edition is waiting before the day starts.
• Built for scale: up to 50 editions a run, four at once.
• Honest output: every edition says what it is: complete, partial, or not out yet.
• Plugs in anywhere: Apify API, webhooks, schedules and integrations.

How to use it

1. Choose your titles.
2. Choose a date, or leave it empty for today (India time).
3. Click Start, then download your PDFs from the Output tab, or fetch them through the API.

{ "papers": ["sakshi", "eenadu"], "date": "2026-11-02" }

Output

One row per edition, with its PDF link. Export as JSON, CSV, Excel or HTML.

{
  "paperName": "Sakshi (Hyderabad Main)",
  "date": "2026-11-02",
  "status": "ok",
  "pages": 22,
  "sizeBytes": 56282776,
  "pdfUrl": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/.../records/sakshi_2026-11-02.pdf"
}

status is ok, partial, not-available (not out yet, or no edition that day), failed, not-allowed (titles marked subscription or internal are reserved), or limit-reached.

Pricing

$0.105 per edition delivered. Nothing is charged for an edition that is not available. The run stops at your spending limit.

FAQ

• Whose content is it? The publishers'. Backup Actor retrieves only what they make freely readable on their own sites. Use it for your own reading, research and monitoring.
• An edition failed? Publishers' sites go down at times. Run it again later.
• Need another title, or a custom pipeline? Open an issue in the Issues tab.