Earlier today I ‘lost’ an account on my server (OK, OK I deleted the wrong one). The problem was I had no backups of the site, it was a WordPress blog that I had written 6 posts for – and you know how long it takes to write a really good quality blog post – but I hadn’t taken a backup since. In a situation like that the first response is to panic, but there are several places that you can look to find and recover the lost documents. I found the posts in my firefox cache using the about:cache command (just type it into the address bar and it allows you to browse your cache), but other places to consider are your RSS reader (for recent items) or archive.org if the site is static and has been online a while. Certainly beats re-writing the stuff.

It reminded me of my college days when losing a floppy disc (yes I am THAT old!) could mean rewriting a months work, and my backpacker days using the old yahoo webmail that didn’t autosave in some cheapo internet cafe with 20 people sharing a dialup connection…

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