How to Retrieve Deleted Web Files Off the Internet

I accidentally deleted a file off a clients web server and thank goodness I had downloaded a copy to my local computer beforehand. I uploaded the copy and was back in business. But I thought, what if I hadn’t of downloaded a copy and I had no backup of the web file?

How to Retrieve Deleted Web Files From the Internet

Well, there would be two locations I could go to on the web to retrieve a copy.

Google – Google indexes the internet, so they have copies of your recently crawled web files, called cached links. To find out if Google has a copy of your web file, type cache:www.yourdomainname.com/pathtoyourwebfile/ into Google.
Wayback Machine – The Wayback Machine is an internet archive that has been archiving websites since 1996. (It’s fun to poke around and see what Yahoo looked like back in the day). To retrieve a copy of your web file, just type in your URL into the search box and click on the Month, Day and Year you need. Whala.

So, if you either overwrite or accidentally delete one of your web files, know that all is not lost.

PS: Here’s a complete resource for finding old websites.

Mike Swartz says, “Check it out”.

Photo by Chandra Oh on Unsplash