If you need to have a website page restored and you have no local backup, you may be able to use Google's cache as an alternative.  When Google crawls your website, it takes a snapshot of your page. The snapshot shows what your page looked like when your page was crawled, and can be accessed through the "Cached" link in Google's search results. Restoring a page using Google's cache is using the html Google saved when crawling your site to rebuild the file you need restored.

Steps to restore your a web page from Google's cache

In this example, we'll show you how you could restore your public_html/index.html file

  1. Search google for cache:YourDomain.com/index.html. Be sure not to have any spaces between cache: and YourDomain.com/index.html
  2. At the top of the page, Google will display a message similar to:

    This is Google's cache of http://www.domain.com/. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on Dec 14, 2009 22:29:21 GMT.


    The snapshot date listed is the date that Google crawled your site. If your page shows correctly below this message, then you should be able to use the html code in Google's cache to attempt to restore the file.

    View the source code of the page. In most browsers you can right-click and choose View Page Source.
  3. While viewing the source code, you can copy and paste the code onto your own website page.  Before copying and pasting it, it is recommended to copy the coding into a blank html page and saving it to see how it will look in your browser. Be sure to remove the top 3 - 4 lines as it is additional code added by Google. If the version of your page in Google's cache will work for you, then you can move the file onto your server and re-name it to the file that it is replacing.

Note that this is not guaranteed to work or show the page as you want it to be displayed, so only use these steps as a last resort to restore your web page.

If you are not able to retrieve your page from Google Cache, you can also try searching for your page in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

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