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Easily finding cached/old versions of a site/page when it's down or gone

Note: This blog post is from 2017. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
Have you ever had a web site "go dark" on you? or found that a given page on a site somehow disappeared? Maybe it's only temporary (there may even be a "we're down" message, though the site or server may just fail to respond at all), or maybe the failure of the page or site will be permanent.

The good news is that there are at least two easy ways that you may well still be able to see that content you may be missing:

  • the Google cache (to at least see the last version which Google may have cached)
  • the internet archive "wayback machine", which often lets you see YEARS back in the history of a page or entire site, including one that may be long-gone.
  • and still another couple of options

TLDR;

Try putting either cache: or web.archive.org/ in front of the URL of whatever page you're trying to visit, as in:

http://web.archive.org/https://www.carehart.org/index.cfm

to perhaps see years of archived versions of a page/site.

Or to see any Google snapshot of the most recent cached version of a page, use this in a Google search,

cache:https://www.carehart.org/index.cfm

Either may or may not work, for various reasons I explain below. And note that this works for domain names or individual web page URLs. You may find that it also works with or without the protocol (http:// or https://), but try using it the other way if one does not work.

For much more, read on, as I share tips (and gotchas) on using both tools.

[....Continue Reading....]

Comments
Thanks Charlie!

I had to add a star.

Example: http://web.archive.o...*/houseoffusion.com
Thanks, Phillip. You know, I had seen that in the past also, but I confirmed what I was seeing did work. Perhaps it's somehow a browser- or OS-specific variation. I have tweaked the entry to help future readers.
Thanks for the post, Charlie.

I would like to clarify that the blog is down only temporarily and we will back with every single post that was earlier available.
# Posted By Rakshith Naresh | 6/8/17 7:36 PM
Thanks for that clarification, Rakshith. Glad to hear you confirm my hopes on both points (I figured it would be back. I hoped it would include all old posts.)

Can you confirm also if you will also be preserving all the previous comments to each? Sometimes they were as valuable as the blog post itself.
archive.org has proved useful many times in recovering clients website content after it has been hacked or lost due to host problems.
Just had one this week in fact, the client was with TalkTalk who built and hosted the site, they let it get hacked, wouldn't fix it, so the site been down since last year, impossible to get FTP access. Used the Wayback machine to find an old version from 2014, which it seems is the last time the site was actually working properly.
# Posted By Snake | 6/30/17 5:21 AM
Sorry I missed your comment there, back in 2017, Russ (Snake). Thanks for sharing that story.

Also, to those who read this post in the past (posted also in 2017), note that I tweaked it today to point out a couple of other options, at the end. That's potentially useful for when either the wayback machine or google cache may no longer have a page you're looking for.
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