Travel Back in time with the WayBack Machine

Have you ever wondered what a site used to look like years ago? Wondered what sites like Microsoft, Apple, BBC all looked like when they were first created? Well your in luck! I have come across a great way you can see this! It’s called the “Wayback Machine”! No, this isn’t something from Doctor Who and don’t worry you wont have to travel at the speed of light to go back in time either.

The WayBack Machine is located over at the Internet Archive Pages (archive.org) and allows you to enter any web address that is over 6 months old and it will have a go at showing you what It used to look like!

Below is an example and for it I have chosen the BBC.co.uk webpage!

Step 1: Enter a URL

The First thing you need to do is head to the archive webpage. Then enter a URL of your choosing! Simple eh? Next go on click that Take Me Back button. Don’t worry nothing will happen to you. You wont end up back when the Internet began! (Would be good though buying google.com, twitter etc )

Step 2: Select a date.

Ok, so Step 2 will show you a list of dates. Now depending on the age of the website this could be anything from a couple to a couple of hundred. Usually there is a different grab of the page for each time it was updated and this is indicated with a little * (asterisk). Click one and you will go back in time to see the result. If you get an error hit the back button and try another page!

Step 3: See the old days of the web! (BBC July 1998)

After selecting a date you can see what the website looked like. Best of all these aren’t images, they are fully interactive so feel free to click the links!

That’s it all done! Why not try out Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Google, Yahoo. You could even try out Alton Towers Magic, which for those who do not know or remember, I was the owner of along with my mate. Don’t pick on the design it was my first site and was far more successful than Cloud Bite

If you Find any sites worth a look at please link to them below!

Link: WayBack Machine

Anyway to get back to topic, I do often waffle a bit in the opening, the other day whilst, tweaking, not messing with the theme of the blog, I some how ended up causing the whole Theme to just, well, break. It refused to show the Header and Footer correctly and whilst many people in the UK were fast asleep I was frantically trying to figure out what I had done. Why not just restore a from one of the many backups you should have, I hear you say? Well, stupidly I fully backup the WordPress database but for some reason only ever backed up the very Original theme version 1 I suppose you could say of the MarksBlogTheme and since I have made hundreds of changes. Hours past trying to work out what went wrong and it was looking like I would have to either start all over or go through each bit of code 1 line at a time. Luckily it didn’t get to this, I noticed an erroneous style sheet had somehow, my fault, been put in completely the wrong directory and for some reason the whole theme was pulling the style from this broken sheet. As soon as I deleted it the theme was fixed.

I was lucky but if I had deleted the working style sheet, the site would of been looking awful for days while I fixed or created a new one. This really got me thinking, why on earth hadn’t I backed up the Whole site. I had been backing up the SQL databases on a weekly schedule but not the whole site. Also when I was “Tweaking” the code for the theme I was changing the only Master copy of the theme I had got. I’m hoping this has actually taught me a lesson and now I am backing up the site more regularly and that’s the whole site not just a part of it. The only thing is I would like some sort of software that could do this automatically perhaps, pulling from my FTP and putting a copy on my PC, if you have any ideas please contact me!

Here though are some tips on backing up your website:

1. Backup all the website or at least the parts that if your site just disappeared you could restore it quickly and as it was before!
2. Make Multiple backups of the files you are editing for instance, when you have a working theme or a working part back it up then tweak further. That way you always have a working system to fall back on(something I didn’t until now)!
3. Do Multiple Backups in Multiple Areas! There’s no point in just putting all your backups on one hard drive or one PC. If you hard drive fails or your whole PC catches fire you have lost your backups. Ideally you want to have Hard Copies i.e. on CD, DVD, USB Drives also you could do with having these in multiple locations not just your home. Perhaps leave a USB stick at work, upload your files to a secure host other than your webhost, megaupload for instance. Just remember if you hold peoples personal details these must be encrypted.
4. Backup and Backup Regularly. There’s no point like I did in have Version 1 of your site backed up when your using version 5 regular backups are always best. Depending on your site this could be Weekly, Daily, even hourly. Just think how often content is changed and or added to and you will be able to work it out.
5. Don’t just keep the latest backup. Depending on the size of your site you may be tempted to save space to just save the most recent backup. The problem with this is, this version may not have been backed up correctly and could be corrupt, or you may have an error deep within the version which could cause problems in the future! You would hate to only have the most recent backup go to restore the site and “File Corrupted” appear! Hard Drives are “as cheap as chips” these days and that’s the potato chips not the silicon variety. So buy a few USB Sticks, Several CDS, Hard Drives anything to store some safe backups on.

So here I have given some tips. It shows that I know what to do it’s just easier not to bother I suppose. Well yes it is, until that day comes when you just need the backup you couldn’t be bothered to do! Don’t be stupid like I was Backup, Backup Regularly, Backup Everything, Everywhere!

If you have some tips, automated software or anything that would/could be helpful e-mail me, Tweet me @marksblog or just post a comment!