Author Topic: Cached pages in IE - help please! (Read 19531 times)

CodeTRUCKER · « **on:** May 11, 2007, 11:14 PM »

Help! A local newspaper has been giving quite a lot of press to antagonist's interests in regard to an organization I know. This is the work of an angry person who was highly offended when his attempts to change community patterns to his own liking were not realized. I can assure you the people are not "kool-aid" drinkers and many of them are my personal friends. Good people.

The main instigator to the attacks has now publicly confessed (on the newspaper's forum) that his accusations against my friends were contrived and none of it is true. On the same forum where all of the vehemence has been vented is now the place of significant embarrassment to the local paper and the reporter that has had major full page stories for weeks in the Sunday editions. Not surprisingly, this forum has been deleted and no confession that it ever existed has been acknowledged when I called to question the paper. They even denied any knowledge of the confession I read with my own eyes.

I am now trying to find that post containing the confession for some specific reasons, but the cache I have no longer can present it.

Does anyone know how I might be able to recover it?

TIA

<edit> Added missing parts of a sentence and corrected some spellings. </Edit>

mouser · « **Reply #1 on:** May 11, 2007, 11:29 PM »

This might help: http://www.nstarsolutions.com/wci/

Also, if you remember any phrases from the deleted page, try searching in google and click the "CACHED VERSION" link to see if google has a cached version of the original page.

Darwin · « **Reply #2 on:** May 11, 2007, 11:33 PM »

Hi Calvin,

You should be able to view cached files by navigating to C:\documents and settings\<user>\local settings\temporary internet files\Content.ie5 and then looking around until you find what you are looking for. However, IE saves these file literally all over the place, no matter what you've defined in your preferences, so also check C:\windows\temp and anywhere else you can think of. Of course, you could also check your index.dat file, but I've never done this (evidently, it keeps weeks even months worth of data about what you've been looking at!). First hit googling for a dat file viewer is donation ware: Index Dat Spy.

EDIT: just looked more closely at Index Dat Spy - I don't think it's going to do you much good as, AFAICT, it won't show you content of websites, just a list of sites that you have visited.

app103 · « **Reply #3 on:** May 11, 2007, 11:41 PM »

Since this was from a newspaper's website, it could possibly be here:

http://news.google.com/archivesearch

Darwin · « **Reply #4 on:** May 11, 2007, 11:43 PM »

Web Cache Illuminator looks like the business to me!

Darwin · « **Reply #5 on:** May 11, 2007, 11:52 PM »

Two points: I wrote the path you need wrong. It's c:\documents and settings\user\local settings\Temporary Internet Files. The other issue is that you may have overwritten the cached page with the updated one when you viewed the censored page... Just be aware of that. I'd search my computer for the IP address of the newspaper and see if you can come up with some buried copies. I keep finding Temporary Internet Folders in odd places with months old dates. I've no idea how or why they got there, given that I've changed the default setting to a folder on a different partition. This *might* work in your favour.

CodeTRUCKER · « **Reply #6 on:** May 12, 2007, 12:06 AM »

I did find a 16KB "~DFE202.tmp" with the precise time stamp I need. Is there a way to open/view these ~*.tmp files?

app103 · « **Reply #7 on:** May 12, 2007, 04:00 AM »

I did find a 16KB "~DFE202.tmp" with the precise time stamp I need. Is there a way to open/view these ~*.tmp files?
-Farmsteader (May 12, 2007, 12:06 AM)

Try opening them in notepad to see if they contain html data.

Darwin · « **Reply #8 on:** May 12, 2007, 05:14 PM »

How'd you make out with this Calvin? Success, I hope...

CodeTRUCKER · « **Reply #9 on:** May 12, 2007, 05:42 PM »

Nothing yet. Thank you for the help.

cthorpe · « **Reply #10 on:** May 12, 2007, 06:27 PM »

Try this one:
http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~timj/cv/

kimmchii · « **Reply #11 on:** May 12, 2007, 06:51 PM »

it's gone, if you havent viewed the updated censored page, the previous page was still in the cache, after you viewed the updated page, it's gone, only the lastest copy saved in the cache.

CodeTRUCKER · « **Reply #12 on:** May 12, 2007, 08:10 PM »

Try this one:
http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~timj/cv/
-cthorpe (May 12, 2007, 06:27 PM)

Unfortunately, no soap there either.

I do appreciate the link.

Darwin · « **Reply #13 on:** May 13, 2007, 12:16 AM »

Drat - I hope the paper does the right thing. Sorry this didn't work out for you.

CodeTRUCKER · « **Reply #14 on:** May 13, 2007, 10:42 PM »

Thanks, but I still have some avenues I can try, albeit not all that promising, but still a "possibility."

mouser · « **Reply #15 on:** May 13, 2007, 10:45 PM »

this is a great idea.

i know that aignes.com Local Website Archive does something like this, but i think it's only on manual request. the idea of cacheing old versions of pages automatically as you surf is i think a great idea. maybe a firefox addon in the making?

Veign · « **Reply #16 on:** May 13, 2007, 10:54 PM »

Anything like what Coral Cache attempts to do:
http://www.coralcdn.org/

This is a great idea for a website that would work in conjunction with a Firefox addin. That way the cache is not on your system and the cache could be of Jpegs of the webpage to help reduce the storage space and the amount of files that are stored per user. Could be huge if someone would create it - Kinda like the Digg Mirror website but on a per user basis. You could call it something like MyCache.com

app103 · « **Reply #17 on:** May 13, 2007, 11:12 PM »

This is what I use Surfulator for. I select the text/images on the page I want to save, right click and add to Knowledgebase by clicking "add article plus page'. It then attaches it to the article, so I have both the selected text and a copy of the page it came from.

There is no automatic way to cache pages with Surfulator but the developer is a great guy and very approachable. Maybe you could request that he add such an option to automatically add every page you view.

I did find something for Firefox that will cache everything: Slogger

Personal Archive Every page you visit can be automatically (in the background) saved to your hardrive (complete webpage, just HTML, or text), stampted with the date and time. With storage becoming so cheap, you can essentially save everything.
plain text history Store browsing history as a customizable plain text file. Store in any format (XML, HTML, CSV, etc.) that suits your needs. Several formats are included in installation Formatted history files can link to online or local copies of pages.
Offline reading Save pages when you happen to be on a fast connection, and read them later.
Blogging / RSS You could set up all of the following to occur on one click of a button: A confirmation window opens allowing you to enter a description (and/or keywords) of the page. This and other information (date, time, url, etc) are written to a custom format XML file used to power an RSS feed of pages you like. The current page is downloaded and saved to [date]/[url].html on your hard drive, perhaps linked to from your log file.
online servies Use services from StumbleUpon, Spurl, del.icio.us, Furl and/or My Yahoo! Search to publish your findings online. (This is temporarity disabled in the newer version...)
anything you want Profiles can contain arbitrary javascript code.

This could be just what you are looking for.

CodeTRUCKER · « **Reply #18 on:** May 15, 2007, 10:52 PM »

Thank you, All so very much! I have not yet had success and I am out of ideas, but it was certainly nice to have all this support.

Second Shadow · « **Reply #19 on:** May 26, 2007, 05:31 PM »

Hi!
This may be a little late to help Farmsteader, but I still wanted to post it.
I was surprised to read this thread and see that no one suggested using "The Wayback Machine" a.k.a. "The Internet Archive" at http://www.archive.org
It's an excellent tool to find lost and / or changed pages. It's not perfect and you won't be able to find there every single page that was once published on the Internet, but it does certainly have an impressive library of "obsolete" pages (85 Billion they say ...) It's definitely worth a check ...

mikiem · « **Reply #20 on:** May 27, 2007, 09:09 AM »

If it helps anyone...

Vcom has a free version of their Powerdesk, that includes their excellent & once hugely popular FileFinder program. If you search your ie temporary internet files folder using *.* it'll pick up a large list of prior cached files, including ones that have been deleted long ago.

Some of the files will be good, others will just give you the names which you might or might not be able to track down, but as a last resort perhaps worth a try. I used to use this *feature* quite often when the kids & nephews were younger -- the names of the image files were usually quite graphic enough to get them busted, & they never did figure out how they got caught.

mouser · « **Reply #21 on:** May 27, 2007, 09:23 AM »

I used to use this *feature* quite often when the kids & nephews were younger -- the names of the image files were usually quite graphic enough to get them busted, & they never did figure out how they got caught.