Last Resort Data Recovery: Google’s Cached Content
Sunday, September 30th, 2007Catastrophic Data loss. It happens to the best of us. But thanks to the Power of the Interwebs, there really is no such thing as a total data loss. If you’re careful and resourceful, you can recover from even the worst data loss.
The Cobbler’s Kids Have No Shoes
On Friday night, I discovered something was very wrong with my site, including this blog. Long story short, despite my paranoia about backing up my data and making frequent archives of my client’s sites, I’m less vigilant about my own sites. To my horror, I found that the data for my very own site, including this blog, had reverted back to March. Meaning every post I had made to this blog for the past 6 months was just gone.
So how does one recover from such a disaster? This is where Google’s cached content comes in handy.
Google’s Cached Content
I was able to do a search for my site using Google’s “site:[sitename]” technique. Enter site:stringfoo.com by itself, and I get every single page that’s indexed by Google.
By clicking on the Cached link, I was able to bring up an archived copy of my site’s pages. Using this technique, I was able to find WordPress’ monthly archive pages, from which I was able to retrieve my post excerpts and titles. Using the titles, I was able to find the full articles. One by one, I was able to recover the posts with relative–if not tedious–ease.
While it certainly is not fun, it is a method of last resort to recover from a catastrophic data loss.
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