How to recover pages from a bad backup

Where to find Google Cache saved page - the one you lost in a bad backup or accidental delete

How to recover pages from a bad backup

Everyone makes mistakes. But what happens when you go to the backup and you can’t recover your web pages?

I had a situation recently where I lost some of my WordPress blog pages. These are pages that I would be hard pressed to rewrite because I wrote them to remember my steps and to help others. Things that I do not have to do on a routine basis as a web designer.

Then I ran into Google cache pages which are saved on Google much longer than you can imagine!

Here’s what you can do:

  • Search for your page in Google. Use as much of the URL as you remember. Look for the little triangle symbol at the end of the URL (see image at the top of this post)
  • Click on Cached page and the page will come up with a banner on the top. Notice you can then recreate your page with the same URL which is helpful for SEO and to minimize 404 error pages.
    how-to-recover web pages from-bad-backup
  • At this point you can save it locally from your web browser.
    Wordpress how-to-recover-from-bad-backup
  • You can then recover your HTML from the local page or from the cached version using Firebug.
    BackupBuddy would not recover when I wanted to move from WPML to single site

You might want to go to Google Webmaster Tools and tell them you fixed the problems.

And this post is quite helpful in locating your pages. I wish I would have had a few of those tips when I was going through the process:  More on Google Cache pages

Best of Luck to you!