It happens regularly to me. I drill a piece of page code while doing some updates. Last week, someone called me in a half-panic because a link that they instructed all of their employees to use had disappeared. Sure enough, I had been working on that page earlier, replacing some PDF links and must have accidentally removed a link I didn’t mean to. So, what did I do?
First, we do have backups and if an entire directory gets whapped or there are other serious issues, I always have that to fall back on, but it can take a lot of work to get into the backups and recover what you are after and in this case I’m looking for one line of code, so I’d like something quicker.
This is a great time to use Google’s web cache. Simply search for the URL of the page you need to fix and Google will very likely have a cached version available that you can use to recover what you lost.
It’s embarrassing, but we actually recovered many MANY sites based on userland Manila after a crash using this method several years ago. We were able to get the images, code and fully recover the sites.
