I read part of the synopsis for w3mir at http://search.cpan.org/dist/w3mir/w3mir.PL. I wish people who don't write English well would have someone edit the documentation for them.

This part makes setup sound complicated:

For authentication and passwords, multiple site retrievals and such you will have to resort to a "CONFIGURATION-FILE". If browsing from a filesystem references ending in '/' needs to be rewritten to end in '/index.html', and in any case, if there are URLs that are redirected will need to be changed to make the mirror browseable, see the documentation of Fixup in the "CONFIGURATION-FILE" secton.

w3mirs default behavior is to do as little as possible and to be as nice as possible to the server(s) it is getting documents from. You will need to read through the options list to make w3mir do more complex, and, useful things.

People are quick to say not to reinvent the wheel, but they'll still tell you to deal with modules when there are complete solutions available. Look at http://www.httrack.com/.