The old tool was a 32 bit and would likely have problems with anyone running 64 bit windows versions.
Yet that legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee
The PBase server, it is said, never gives up her data
When the skies of November turn gloomy
With a loads of photo bytes twenty-six thousand gigs more
Than the mighty PBASE weighed empty
That good sever and RAID drives was a bone to be chewed
When the holiday bandwidth gales of November came early....
There is this older thread for help
https://form.pbase.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=48495 for a new fork of an older download tool. Although there was far earlier version that snagged the images. I can't remember the guy's user name at the moment, he was from India and it began with "S" and he helped out in the forums a lot in the early 2000's answer questions along side a few of users. If you want to try and search it up.
EDIT Their name was (found in my old outdated sigfile of all places) srijith maybe their website has a saved copy or there is a saved copy on the internet archive.
There is a post about
HTTrack working on reddit in
"Open Directories" subreddit but that is dangerous place to lurk, you could wind up downloading far more than you every thought possible.
https://www.reddit.com/r/opendirectories/comments/q4xtto/pbase_downloading/The having an ability to download your account in one or a few clicks that automates the collection and presents it as a file for you, has been a long requested featured. You can download the images , saving the EXIF data with them but saving any comments becomes an issue. HTTrack would save each page with comments but you have to set the option for how far to go down and to account for sub galleries inside of sub galleries and then the images. Which would need to be factored in. Grabbing the Small, medium, large, original images would be include 4 links down if I recall. I used long ago.
I've been here since October 2001 and remember back when the owners were unmarried, dating and in college. Site issues took longer to get back up during finals week. In those years. "Slug" (Charles) took donations but he built PBase so photographers could share images online easier without having their free site go dead for the images being popular. Yes the free hosting sites worked by serving ads to visitors but if you had to many visitors, hence they served far more ads, they would make it your images unreachable until the bandwidth clock limit reset for the day, week, and/or month. Being popular was a blessing and curse. Surprisingly Tripod and Angelfire are the only 2 that survived and are still hosting those free websites. Not that google will show them in search results.
I too worry about PBase staying up and past the owners, I think they'll outlive me. As the Internet Archive doesn't want to record or save copies of PBASE . That Web Archive thinks its far better trying to save some of Instagram or tumbler's crap. The odd thing about our pictures and now looking back over 10 millions hits later, thought I was hot ka-ka for reaching 5,000 and then 10,000 hits. I never set out to document and serve as the depositor of my city scenes and friends lives. PBase was a way at first to help people get images because the images from a night out would over run everyone's inbox limits. Remember those days of hotmail/yahoo email account 100MB limits ? Then came the glorious 250 MB increase..... Now a days, I don't upload much but those galleries serve more and more as memorials. Every time someone passes, there is surge in traffic. Some Photos still don't have names, seriously what a cruel joke was it to make a person that is bad with names responsible for getting them right on their images. Some people will only be know forever as ?? it seems. It is weird looking back and seeing what I helped build, without intending to.
Nothing stays online forever and worse there is so much digital content that the odds of any of it being preserved, if you didn't make prints and send copy to the library of congress, is sadly very low. It will be like when Yahoo deleted all the Geocities websites and images. Basically taking out the early internet and all those early images people painstakingly had to scan the film image in to digital formats then upload and finally code that into a website to be seen. Back when an image scanner bed cost so much, you would go to the library to use their 1 scanner in the computer lab. If you remember how much Photoshop 4 was the next big "game changer"...., you're just making even Pepperidge Farm feel old.