No backup, no problem - thanks to the wayback machine

I did the original web site for Karora Technologies just after we got the company incorporated. It was nothing fancy, and I mostly used Microsoft Publisher because it came bundled with the first laptop we purchased. Later on, we hired a graphic design firm to come up with a clean, simple design that incorporated Aboriginal imagery. The designers delivered and we ended up with an awesome website in my opinion.

Later on as the company got bigger, management of the website was handed over to the marketing/sales area who had someone on the team who had "done websites in the past" using FrontPage. The decision was made to "revamp" the site, and along the way we lost the simplicity and elegant of the "Karora Dreaming" site. In fairness, the requirement was to be able to easily update the site, and this was difficult at the time because it was using bare HTML.

Anyway, five years down the track and the new site badly needs to be updated. Karora has since downsized, and no longer has FrontPage people on staff, so I offered to help out in my copious amounts of spare time (yeah, right!).

The first thing I wanted to do was go back to the look and feel the design firm had come up with so I asked for the backups. Backups? You guessed it - there were no backups. Sure, they were done at the time the site was swapped over, but the machine they were on has since disappeared into the ether. The design firm didn't have anything either.

Then I remembered reading about the "Wayback Machine". This is an initiative of the Internet Archive organization. Basically, they take snapshots of the web so you can see what a site looked like at a particular point in time. I wondered if the Karora site was on it, and sure enough there were entries going way back to my initial dodgy version from 1999.

So, I was able to recover our old website design (with a little help from HTTrack). Thanks WayBack Machine!

Comments

[Thanh-Man]

Very Kool!

[Thanh-Man]

PS: How about turning on your rdf comments feed?

[Chris]

I use this when I'm curious to see the evolution of webpages (Amazon is a good one). It uses the WayBackMachine engine. http://www.archive.org/index.php

[Brian]

HTTrack is a wicked little program, I was looking for something like this and now I have found it, Thanks Gavin Brian If you have a bit of time to spare check out my new Tech Blog at http://www.britec.co.uk/techblog/

[osh]

you got lucky on that one. :-) i like wayback for doing research, especially on UI. you can look at a site like yahoo.com and see how their home page and biz strategy evolved over the years. i also like furl.net for capturing my own personal archive of web pages at different points in time.