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I have a bit of a problem. My client is running a Joomla 1.0 site and some content (text) was lost. There was no backup configured of the MySQL database. The content was lost approx. around the 16:th of December 2012. I tried finding the old site by using the Web Archive, but no cigar. The site is not even indexed.

I tried to retrieve it via Google cache instead. The cached page itself didn't have the content, but the preview screenshot of the website had the old content. I wrote everything I could read off the screenshot. However, there was content below the screenshot that could not be retrieved.

Here is what I typed into Google Search to find the old page:

site:gerami.se previous ass

Ass = assignments for those wondering ;)

I would really like to get the rest of the text that was below the screenshot when it was taken.

P.S: Whether this thread gets a solution or not, the moral of the story is still the same: Backup is your friend!

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  • You may try this one webcache.googleusercontent.com/…
    – neo
    Jan 21, 2013 at 9:33
  • The content I'm looking for is this: gerami.se/main/… and it should range from 2012 to 2004. The content I managed to find and copy was only from 2012 to 2009 (from the google preview screenshot).
    – nctrnl
    Jan 21, 2013 at 9:36
  • you are out of luck. it only cached 1 page.
    – neo
    Jan 21, 2013 at 9:46
  • Perhaps. It irritates me that the screenshot cache only shows a portion of the website. I have Googled a lot of stuff before and there are cases where the screenshot spans a few rows to display certain portions on the lower part of the site. I have tried to force this behaviour by searching like "site:gerami.se previous ass 2004" to force a snapshot taken from the lower part. No luck.
    – nctrnl
    Jan 21, 2013 at 9:51

2 Answers 2

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Since it is an .se site it is possible (although by no means certain) that the National Library of Sweden (Kungliga biblioteket) has archived the page. They have had a fairly robust web archiving program for many years but it will depend very heavily on how long your site was live whether or not they might have captured it. Given the year range in your comments (2004-2012) I'd say it was fairly probable that they have at least some of your content archived.

Unlike the Internet Archive, their web archive is not publicly accessible. You'll need to contact them and ask if they have your content and if it is possible for them to extract and send it your way.

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  • This is in fact a good idea that I havn't thought of. I will give it a try.
    – nctrnl
    Jan 22, 2013 at 8:03
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You could try using bing: they generate cached versions of pages just like google.

The reason why the screenshot on google shows the content and the cached page doesn't is because the screenshot was generated earlier than the cached page (the cached page is more up to date).

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  • I've tried bing, no luck. Yes, I realize the screenshot of the page is old thus it contains the information I want. What I was thinking was that several pages on Google have a screenshot preview that ranges from the top to the bottom even though only a portion is displayed for the one searching. They don't necessarily display the top of the page when previewing, they might as well display the top part of the page as well as a text snippet from an area below the margin. I thought if this behaviour could be forced, then I would get all information I need. But I havn't managed to do it so far.
    – nctrnl
    Jan 22, 2013 at 7:58

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