Here’s a slight admission as we get started: the information in this week’s article won’t be something you use every day, and if all goes well, you won’t actually ever have to use it.  Just in case you manage to lose some site data, though, here are some tips on how to recover almost everything.

Google’s cache is key here, and so is the advice of John Mu, who works for the search giant.  Mu recently walked someone through the recovery process in a post on the Google Webmaster Help Forum.

So if something important hiccups, Mu suggests, “ASAP Take your website down, do not let the server respond to any requests.  This is important because otherwise the cached pages will be overwritten by whatever content you have online now.”

Then use the Warrick tool.  Mu continues, “It’s pretty much the best way to get your content from Google and from the other sites that cache your pages.  They’ll send you an email with the content when it’s ready (1-2 days depending on the site).”

Finally, “Once you have the Warrick files, you can put your server back up & work on patching things together.”

This may not be terribly fast, but it sounds somewhat easy, and is sure to be better than starting from scratch if catastrophe strikes.

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