Recover a Lost Web Site
Mrs. Ozz is a genius! Tonight she asked me, “what happened to Lowcountry Christian Community School web site?” As you can see from that link, there is little to see on their web site right now, well at least until I complete the instructions I am about to share with you. I told Mrs. Ozz that the LCCS administrators had let their domain registration and hosting service expire. This resulted in the hosting service deleting all of the HTLM files for that domain to free up space for the next paying customer. I told my wife that the school administrators had asked me to help build a replacement site which I had promised to do when I got some free time.
The next thing out of my wife’s mouth made me feel REALLY stupid. She asked, “can’t you just get a copy of the site from one of those online services that saves everything automatically?” My response was, “You are a GENIUS! I have not even considered that.” She turned a couple of shades of red as I proceeded to follow her advice.
What she is talking about is something like the Internet Archive WayBackMachine. As a result of her suggestion, I have been able to recover about 90% of the content from the original LCCS web site as it was last displayed in August 2007.
To recover the site I did the following:
- Searched archive.org for the LCCS site
- Clicked on the most recent copy of the site (Aug 2007)
- Using Firefox - selected File - Save Page As (making sure to choose type “web page complete”)
- Navigated to each subpage and repeated step 3 for each
- Edit the content and FTP it into the new site location (In Progress)
That’s it. Now I have a pretty solid copy of the content from the school’s site prior to their domain and hosting service expiring. I can use these HTML pages to create the same look, feel, and content that they had prior to the expiration.
By the way, you have not heard the last of Mrs. Ozz. She has got the itch to do a little blogging. She will be joining me on The Land of Ozz(s) and she may actually jump into the mix over at GrowingKids.org as well.
