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Thursday, August 23, 2007

Website Recovery...

You should always backup your website - always. Weekly, or every time you make changes. It's not difficult or expensive. Basically you want to make sure that should your computer crash (like mine did 3 days ago) you can recover your website. Yes, it's online, but it's not unheard of for hosts to crash too. It has happened to me! I lost a store with over 200 products -- POOF!

Well, that aside, I was working off of my backup for Witty Mom Safety Products. I had the page up, made the changes, uploaded it.

When I went to the website to double-check the work, it was a blank page. How could that be? I mean, I'm staring at it in FrontPage - everything intact. I preview, looks good. I upload - nuttin'!

Well, easy fix. I'll close out of the version in FrontPage and reopen it. When I reopened it, BLANK PAGE!

So, I have a blank page on the server and I have a blank page on my backup, lol. What I really need is the page loaded with text and graphics that I was staring at 2 minutes earlier.

Do I panic? No way! I have a secret weapon...the Wayback Machine.

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine - http://www.internetarchive.org/ - visit, type in your domain, and you'll see a list of dates. Pick the most recent date and there's your site! Of course, if you change your site a lot, or if its new, you may not get exactly what you're after, but in this case it was a lifesaver. I just clicked the recent date, navigated to the lost page, right-click, view source, copy & paste into FrontPage. Voila!

The Wayback Machine saved me from having to rebuild a page and can often save you from having to rebuild your entire site from scratch.

Now, don't be naive! This isn't a save-all. Sometimes the links are dead, sometimes the graphics are missing. But if you're up a creek - this may be your paddle!

1 comments:

Ranjeet Kr. Vimal said...

hii, ya really nice information regarding website recovery. could you please tell me more abt it, like hw it recover from search engines cache,.. i am very desperate to know to, and i want to build such type of system for my bachelor's project. if u hv any information regarding website recovery, please let me know. my ID is ranjeet4u@gmail.com.. thanks again