Finding where on the hard drive FFox puts visited websites
I was browsing a forum and a thread that I was reading got deleted, when I refreshed it I got a message saying it's no longer available. The thing is I BADLY BADLY BADLY need the information that was in there. This happened something like 2 days ago and I still have the tab open in which I was browsing this thread (but when I click back nothing happens).
I'm hoping that the webpage that was this forum thread is still saved somewhere in firefox's chache or temporary files or something like this. I need the actual text, not any of the media that was on the page like images. If anyone could tell me how I could get to this you'd be helping me out A LOT.
Усі відповіді (6)
Unfortunately, I fear that reloading the page may have wiped out the previously cached copy (assuming the site allows pages to be cached). There might be some file system dark magic to scrape up the electrons and reconstruct it, but using normal means, I would not be optimistic.
Can you find the page in either Google's or Bing's cache?
I tried searching for it with bing and google but nothing. And I doubt any other search engine would have cached it because this page was online for something like 30 minutes.
Provided the refresh didn't wipe the page from Firefox's cache, where would I find it?
If you type or paste about:cache in the address bar and press Enter, the physical location of the Disk Cache folder (ignore the Offline Cache folder) will be listed. That directory contains four large files that I believe contain most or all of the textual content of web pages, but there also is the possibility that the data is in one of the randomized subfolders depending on how the site works.
If you can find the page listed in the about:cache data for the "desk device" it might provide a clue about where the data is physically located. Warning: the List Cache Entries link takes a long time to load; prepare to brew a cup of coffee because the PC will be working very hard.
Hmmm, maybe there's an add-on for this??
Thanks a lot for your help!
I found the cache folder and it contained the four files you mentioned and a bunch of folders titled just "1," "2," etc. through to 0 and then the next sequence started from a down the alphabet.
I opened the four files with notepad and one of them does indeed seem to contain text from web pages, but hte majority of it is just jibberish sequences of symbols with an ocassional phrase that can be found in the mess so I don't know how I'd harvest the text out of this. Others seem to list web pages with some infor on them, one is just jibberish.
In the list of entries that you get via the "List Cache Entries" link I found the link to the site I'm looking for (hopefully it is the version I'm looking for, not a later or earlier one), how do I use it to locate the data on my hdd? It is listed as a clickable link but I hesitate to click on it lest it leads me back to where the page is online and overwrites whatever is cached. The link is in this form:
about:cache-entry?client=HTTP&sb=1&key=http://www.***.com
The information I'm offered is "data size," "fetch count," "last modified" and "expires." Can I use this to find it somehow? The fetch count is 1.
Also, I had an idea:
I know what text there was on the page I'm looking for, so if I could direct windows to search every file on my HDD for a certain string of text which I know only occured on that page I could turn it up that way. I don't know how to do this, tho. The search function in windows has an option of searching for a text string inside a file, but I don't know whether he would search ALL files rather than only text files.
I agree: do not follow the link to the (now missing) page.
I haven't researched the layout of those cache files. If you found one that seems to have useful content, it makes sense to back it up. Beyond that, I don't know how best to convert/view the content.
Well, the link I had found on the list of cached pages (the list in about:cache->"desk device") turned out to not be the one I was looking for but another thread on the same forum.
I searched through the entire list for links that are on the same domain and have the additional "/forum" in their url (like "www.x.com/forum") and I opened all of them up (I was able to identify which file in the cache folder they are by their size) but the page I'm looking for seems to not be on the list.
I find this hard to believe because I found some web pages cached which I looked at very close time-wise to the page I'm looking for, so I find it hard to believe that it cached those but skipped the one I need.
Does anyone know why I might not be finding it? Is there a way to generate a more comprehensive list? Might it be in my cache folder but not on the list?
I'm REALLY desperate to get this.