Recovering long lost website information (data) with wayback machine

Monday, 9th May 2011

Wayback machine, see 2 years old website from cache service

I needed a handy way to recover some old data of an expired domain containing a website, with some really imprtant texts.
The domains has expired before one year and it was not renewed for the reason that it’s holder was not aware his website was gone. In the meantime somebody registered this domain as a way to generate ads profit from it the website was receiving about 500 to 1000 visitors per day.
Now I have the task to recover this website permanently lost from the internet data. I was not able to retrieve anything from the old domain name be contained via google cache, yahoo cache, bing etc.
It appears most of the search engines store a cached version of a crawled website for only 34 months. I’ve found also a search engine gigablast which was claimed to store crawled website data for 1 year, but unfortunately gigablast contained not any version of the website I was looking for.Luckily (thanks God) after a bit of head-banging there I found a website that helped me retrieve at least some parts from the old lost website.

The website which helped me is called WayBack Machine

The Wayback Machine , guys keeps website info snapshots of most of the domain names on the internet for a couple of years back, here is how wayback machine website describes its own provided services:

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine puts the history of the World Wide Web at your fingertips.

Another handy feature wayback machine provides is checking out how certain websites looked like a couple of years before, let’s say you want to go back in the past and see how yahoo’s website looked like 2 years ago.

Just go to web.archive.org and type in yahoo and select a 2 years old website snapshot and enjoy 😉

It’s really funny how ridiculous many websites looked like just few years from now 😉

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5 Responses to “Recovering long lost website information (data) with wayback machine”

  1. Evelina Oharroll says:
    Firefox 3.0.14 Firefox 3.0.14 Windows XP Windows XP
    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.14) Gecko/2009082707 Firefox/3.0.14 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

    Awesome blog more than here! Thanks for sharing this incredibly usefull information. I will visit your blog once more into a couple off days to verify in case you have some new articles.

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  2. Boris Mestayer says:
    Firefox 3.0.14 Firefox 3.0.14 Windows XP Windows XP
    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.14) Gecko/2009082707 Firefox/3.0.14 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

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  3. Best Website says:
    Firefox 3.5.3 Firefox 3.5.3 Windows 7 Windows 7
    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3

    I google the articles inline with my work and what my clients ask me about and subcribe to them.
    Thanks you

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  4. Philip says:
    Google Chrome 20.0.1132.57 Google Chrome 20.0.1132.57 Windows 7 x64 Edition Windows 7 x64 Edition
    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/536.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/20.0.1132.57 Safari/536.11

    The internet archice is great, so is the Warrick tool (requires som scripting experience). The problem with IA is that the data is usually pretty old, and Warrick can be complicated to use (though an excellent tool). I therefore created http://recovermywebsite.com which can recover recent lost webpages (though not images yet). The service is free and I hope you like it.

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