So, first a shout out to my friend Richard Getz over at Getz.pro for the tip on using Google Cache to recover my blog. I created a new hosting account under my business to keep business expenses separate from my personal web sites. However, I did not count on Weebly. I thought I had made backups of my blog posts… even had a folder on my laptop “blogs”… which was empty.
So,when I transferred the domain to my new business account I could no longer access the blogs. Even though it was the same hosting service, the actual server which hosted my site was different and could not access the blogs…. GREAT.
My hosting provider said I was SOL (that’s a technical Navy term) and pointed me Weebly. Weebly told me they did not have my blogs on their server because of a special agreement with my hosting provider. I have been in this situation before. There is little point in arguing with the technicians. I was contemplating how tough it would be to hack the server that formerly hosted my blog and recover the backups.
As I was pondering the legality of hacking a system I am authorized to use to recover my personal data, my good friend Richard Getz suggested I try to use the WayBack Machine at archive.org to try to recover my blog. I patiently explained that I already tried that, and they did not have any record of my blog yet. He then suggested Google cache. What?
Basically, search for a web site, like my old blog http://www.yumtechnology.com/blog.html and instead of clicking on the link, click on the little green down arrow and select “Cached”. It took a lot of work finding every blog post. I found that Google had cached my blog by category.
So, I could pull up the entire month of March 2016 on one page. Nice! But for some reason the month of April 2016 was missing (even when searching specifically for it). So, I had to search for those post on other categories.
Hopefully, I found everything. I definitely will warn people about Weebly blogs in the future. As my good friend Richard pointed out the painfully obvious fact, if I had made a backup it wouldn’t have been a problem. So nice to have friends.
