Perhaps the best method to not lose any digital data is, obviously, back-up. Be it a video project, a PowerPoint presentation, or your whole blog: there is little room to go wrong when you have copies of all your data in a folder on the same computer, on flash drive or an external hard drive. You can almost always come back to it and retrieve anything you may have damaged or lost while working on the originals.
To access a Google-cached page, search for it and click on "Cached":
For the purpose of this blog, I will continue using the STA website to demonstrate how to retrieve your file.
The following is a snapshot of the cached page:
Note that the first post is by Tashi and it is dated December 18, 2009. Today is February 21, so it means that the cached version is around two months old. Also note the gray box at the top from google indicating that this is a cached website. You definitely do not want that to appear on your website in case you retrieved the same site.
So what you should do next is save the current page to your computer. To do so, click on File > Save As from your browser, and then give it a name and hit save.
Next you will need to open this page with an HTML editing tool to make the editing process easier. To do so, I will open it with Adobe Dreamweaver on a Mac.
Now a quick and easy way to delete the box is to highlight its outer border, and simply hit delete and it should be gone.
Save your page, and give it the original name (granted this is the version you need of the page) and upload it to your website through FTP or any other method you are using to edit your website. (For further information on updating your website using FTP on Dreamweaver, check Nick's excellent post on that matter.)
Your page is ready, your website it back to normal, but for next time, be sure to back-up your files!
Losing HTML files for a website is frustrating, and if you do not have proper backup, there is ample space for one to lose his files, especially if you are FTPing files to a server.
If you have indeed lost your HTML files for your website by, for example, overwriting your new homepage file with an old one, it might as well be an emergency, and you might have to redo all your changes. This might not only cause you to spend hours and hours redoing all your edits, If you remember them, but it would also be very frustrating.
Fortunately, there may be a small trick to go around this, and it uses Google Cache.
Google's Cached pages are to an extent an archive of websites. Website "snapshots" are taken at certain periods in time, and unlike other archive machines like the Wayback Machine -- whose purpose, as the name suggests, is to check websites that are no longer existing or just very old version of them -- Google's cache service provides more recent version, and its primary purpose is to help you with your searches. You are expected to check cached versions when a search time can no longer be found in the website after you click on it from the search results, or the website is down, and the cached version will probably have the results you need.
To access a Google-cached page, search for it and click on "Cached":
For the purpose of this blog, I will continue using the STA website to demonstrate how to retrieve your file.
The following is a snapshot of the cached page:
Note that the first post is by Tashi and it is dated December 18, 2009. Today is February 21, so it means that the cached version is around two months old. Also note the gray box at the top from google indicating that this is a cached website. You definitely do not want that to appear on your website in case you retrieved the same site.
So what you should do next is save the current page to your computer. To do so, click on File > Save As from your browser, and then give it a name and hit save.
Next you will need to open this page with an HTML editing tool to make the editing process easier. To do so, I will open it with Adobe Dreamweaver on a Mac.
Now a quick and easy way to delete the box is to highlight its outer border, and simply hit delete and it should be gone.
Save your page, and give it the original name (granted this is the version you need of the page) and upload it to your website through FTP or any other method you are using to edit your website. (For further information on updating your website using FTP on Dreamweaver, check Nick's excellent post on that matter.)
Your page is ready, your website it back to normal, but for next time, be sure to back-up your files!
Hey Rayan, that's very interesting. Do you know if there is a way to manually make a cache of a website or does google do it automatically and is there any way to control it?