The wayback machine saved me after I lost my old website design files

I was cleaning out my hard drive last month and realized all my old HTML files from 2005 were gone... just gone. My dog had knocked over a cup of coffee onto my external drive a few years back and I never checked if it still worked. I was about to give up when I remembered archive.org has a wayback machine and typed in my old URL. It pulled up my entire site from 2006, complete with the spinning globe gif and guestbook entries. Has anyone else had luck recovering stuff they thought was permanently deleted?

2 comments

2 Comments

nancy1541d ago

Oh man, my friend Sarah had the exact same thing happen! She spilled soda on her old laptop and thought her high school band's website was gone forever. She found it on the Wayback Machine last year and spent the whole weekend laughing at the MIDI files they had playing in the background. It's wild that stuff sticks around like that.

the_miles15h ago

The MIDI files are the best part honestly. My friend found his old Geocities page from 1998. Had a guestbook with messages from people he didn't even know. The auto-playing midi of "All Star" by Smash Mouth was still working. Just raw, terrible web design that somehow captured a whole era. Makes you wonder what weird stuff we're leaving behind right now that someone will dig up in 20 years.