If you have been working with computers for any amount of time you have realized the importance of backing up your work. Of course no one has the time to backup their work so they just go ahead and make those few small changes to their site. Then it happens..... a sinking feeling..... as your web page suddenly disappears or errors out or even worse - the whole site goes down.

What are you to do now? You should run to your IT Policy Handbook and look up what to do in case of data loss.

That is brilliant Phillip let me go find it...

What? You don't have an IT Policy Handbook? In that case PANIC or

just call Thalo and we can help you recover your lost data in 99% of cases. Here are some tricks on how to find that precious data you just lost on your website.

If the page you need as existing on your server for some time there is most likely an archive of your pages. We run into issues where someone's webmaster mysteriously disappears and the site is lost forever to the client. Smart IT companies know there is more than one way to eat an Apple (we'll miss you Steve Jobs).

Check the Web Archives - Way Back Machine: http://www.archive.org/index.php

If you know the page is relatively new to the Internet then you probably won't find it in the Way Back Machine. In that case you just need to search the Internet for a cached version of your page. Many times Google has recently cached versions of pages that you have "lost".

You have to use a little ingenuity and talent to find this information but you aren't afraid of a little hard work. After all frantically searching for your data is much more fun then just backing it up in the first place. ;)

Go to Google and search for your domain and the word that best describes the page that you have lost. You can try searching for your domain and then the file name if you have it like: domain.com page.html .

For example I needed to find a Rules page that was recently overwritten by accident. =P

I searched Google for bigcanoenews.com marketplace rules and found the results I needed. When you mouse over any results from Google you will see a ">>" symbol to the right of the listing. This expands and shows you a screen shot of what the page looks like visually.

Now right above the screen shot of your page you will see the 'url' to the page. Next to that you will see the phrase:

Cached

That is a fancy computer word for a saved version of that page. If you click the 'Cached' link you will see the page as Google last indexed it. (They even give you the date too which comes in handy if you are trying to figure out how often Google indexes your web pages.)

If you still cannot find your web page or your data then I guess it is time to pick up the phone and call in a professional.

Until Next Time...