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 is how the 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 ;)