I was fixing some broken links in various blog posts using the WordPress plugin, Broken Link Checker. As I was working my way down the list of broken links, I clicked the wrong command and deleted the whole post.
My blog is backed up so I didn’t panic, but I would have had to take several steps to retrieve an individual file from the backup or pay my hosting company $75.00 to restore my entire blog. Neither of those solutions appealed to me, especially since I would have lost all the work I’d done repairing all those broken links.
Then I remembered Google’s cached pages.
Google takes a snapshot of each page it examines and caches (stores) that version as a backup. Since practically every search result includes a Cached link, I knew I stood a good chance of recovering my file the free and easy way. Here’s what I did.
UPDATE: In a newer post, I recorded a how-to video.
- Put the title of the blog post I’d deleted into Google’s search box and found the link to it on the first page of results.
- Held the mouse over the result, and a double chevron appeared >>. Held my mouse over that to see a preview of my site.
- Click Cached (if you get an error message, try a different browser),
When I click Cached, up popped my blog post I’d deleted!
A quick copy and paste onto a blank post page had the article fully restored. And since my images were still stored, they appeared in all the right places. I wanted to make sure the link to my post wouldn’t be broken so I was careful to type the title exactly as the original.
Google saved the day! And sometimes, Yahoo will (when you can’t find what you’re looking for in Google, try Yahoo.com.
So when things happen, don’t panic. Think!
PEACE.
