SiteCrafting, Inc.
18 Aug
Quick Lost Content Recovery Option
No matter how protected your website may be, sometimes you still need a helping hand when an accident happens. Delete a page while fumbling with FTP? Someone else in your office write over your work on a webpage? Heck, maybe your entire site is down! Google Cache may be able to help.
Even with offerings like distributed server environments, backups, content versioning, etc. that we're proud to offer clients here at SiteCrafting, sometimes a quick, self-serve fix can be just the answer. Enter Google cache. Most webpages that Google indexes are stored temporarily to allow searchers options for viewing content results. This feature can also be used to recover written content (not images and other rich media) in a bind.
Here's what you do:
- Enter the web URL of the page you want to recover into Google's search box
or
Search for some content on the afflicted page in quotes with the domain name after it (e.g. "brief timeline" sitecrafting.com) - Click on the "Cached" link when find the right result page
- Copy and Paste and re-format the content into your webpage editor to save and re-post on your site
I've recommended this method a few times to folks that haven't thought of Google's cached pages in this way. Your mileage may vary, of course, depending on how often Google crawls your website and how long it's been since your content r-u-n-n-o-f-t. In the meantime, happy cache spelunking!
Odds 'n Ends, Security, Web Hosting
by Kevin Freitas | 8/18/2008 2:48pm | Comments (3)
by Kevin Freitas | 8/18/2008 2:48pm | Comments (3)
I've, in the past, used the wayback machine ( http://www.archive.org/web/web.php ) to bring clients back from bad hosting situations. It isn't a replacement for a proper backup or failover strategy, but it is at least a good tool in bringing your site back online. The wayback machine is similar to google cache, except the wayback machine gives you a timeline of changes. This means you can get back old content that google cache may not show you.
Left by Paul Sayre | Aug 18, 2008
Yeah archive.org is a great solution if they are able to archive it, whats nice with archive.org is you can view a entire mirrored copy of the site, while google cache only lets you see that one page. I've also found sites that are all flash don't archive well on their site.
Left by Michael Pierce | Aug 18, 2008
Two great tools are Warrick (you need to be able to script) or http://recovermywebsite.com (free and easy to use) which both recover from the cache automatically.
Left by Ryan Nielsen | Jan 7