Being a developer is not easy, specially if you like to do things in hurry and are absent minded like me. I am sure you must have edited, deleted few files only to later realize that the older files are gone forever. So here is the solution which may work for live sites. But first, the background story -

Yesterday while building a site for a client, I accidentally overwrote few files without realizing what I am doing! Now after few hours, I got a super angry mail that “what the ##c# I did, the site got changed and now the images are not there as well as the recent changes are gone, fix it everything immediately”

Now I have seen panicked clients before so this wasn’t a new thing but the fact that I had no idea what went wrong was more worrying. So I logged into the site and saw that accidentally I overwrite few files and those files are gone forever including few images. I immediately called the hosting company (I take the phone number of hosting companies of my client in such urgency as it saves time) and called them in USA, only to realize that they don’t have yesterday’s back.

Now this was a super bad news, because in few minutes, I managed to lose a site and work of few thousand dollars. Thankfully, I look in Google cache and the pages which got lost were fully indexed including images and I swear to god, it was an awesome feeling. I immediately copied the html code from the cache and built the lost pages. The overall exercise did took about 2 hours though but still I managed to recover everything. Luckily the files got deleted were all static html files and no php files.

So How to Recover Accidentally deleted html pages and images using Google Cache ?

Simple, if the url of the page which got lost is http://example.com/page-lost then go to www.google.com and in search box, type this cache: http://example.com/page-lost and it will show you the cached version of the page in Google index. Since most of the sites nowadays gets cached immediately, the chances of you finding your page in Google cache are very high.

PS – If you are a developer, I will highly advice you to start using CVS for big and long term projects, and even for smaller work, make sure all edits get into log files. Infact that is why using Dreamweaver or Eclipse or any such IDE is an excellent idea.

PS2 – if you are looking for a very old content, say a year back, you can look at http://www.archive.org/ and probably you can find a version of the page which you are looking for.

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