Has anyone or their Web host lost any valuable web pages or an entire site and could not find or locate a recent backup?

Some of you already know this, but it is interesting how may Webmasters or Web Designers STILL have not thought of this tactic

USE the CACHE on Google, Yahoo and MSN and use the 'SITE': Command. And for old images, use the Internet Archive.

But here is and interesting add on for FireFox that Searches ALL the major caches for missing sites:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2570

There is another option that surprisingly, many people have not thought of. GET THE TEMPORARY FILES from any computer that has recently viewed the site that you can get access to.

This means you will find also: Flash, CSS, JS files as well as images.

This add on for FireFox actually allows you to search and organize the cache files without the troublesome manual commands

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2489

for IE users, just go to TOOLS --> INTERNET OPTIONS -->
then locate the appropriate submenu and copy and paste those files into the desktop or another directory for safe keeping.

It might be helpful to GROUP BY name or Internet Address

and if no FTP program is available, and you are really desperate...

you can use the ftp://domainname.com command in the Internet Explorer address bar, and when the popup appear, put in the username and password to immediatly access your Web site Webpage files to begin pasting or dragging in the 'recovered files'

or you can use ftp://username:passworddomainname.com (wipe away your traces if others use the pc)

You can also use this strategy to get YouTube videos or MP3 files that you have already accessed, without using any of the youtube downloaders

If you need to do a HTML modifications and do not have any WYSIWYG editors around, just open View Source for the webpage and put in the
BASE HRE F= tag in the head with the URL of the domain name –
then save it to the desktop as an .html file.

This allows for modifying and instantly previewing the design without having to make constant round trips to the server to inspect.

...this and more tuturials will be archived on http://seoptimization.blog.com

sounds good.

Sounds good. Is seoptimization.blog.com your new site, SEW?

Getting your files from a cache source will only get you the output of any of your web pages. If your site uses a scripting language for anything, you will not be getting back any of that code unless you found a copy of the source code somewhere on your computer saved in its original form.

Just use Google Desktop.

Good plug Tom

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://blogoscoped.com

Internet Archive (Wayback Machine) – New Database now has Caches Up to APRIL 24th 2007

You can now go back as recently as two months ago to visit sites.

BTW:
If you are using this as a method of replacing a hacked site, remember to remove their embedded JavaScript codes

Did you see this tool: http://www.cs.odu.edu/~fmccown/research/lazy/warrick.html ?

It's a sleek combination of those methods.

John