Paid $15 for a dead link recovery tool and it found nothing but old captchas

Was trying to pull up a cached version of a local music blog from 2016 that had this one live review I wrote. Wayback Machine had the homepage but not the individual posts. Found some recovery software that promised to dig through old DNS records. Wasted a Saturday afternoon and all it kept pulling up were spam comments and captcha images. Anybody know a better way to find old blog archives that aren't on archive.org?

2 comments

2 Comments

eric_wright775d agoMost Upvoted

Man those "dead link recovery" tools are a total scam, I fell for one too. They just scrape basic DNS records that anyone can pull up for free. Dude honestly if Wayback Machine doesn't have it you're probably out of luck unless someone saved it locally. Have you tried checking Google cache directly with the "cache:" command in the search bar? Sometimes old pages stick around there even after they disappear from the live web. Also try searching the URL with a wildcard on archive.is, that site catches stuff Wayback misses sometimes.

nancy_owens5d ago

Gotta push back a little on you @eric_wright77, those tools saved me when I needed a contract from a site that went down in 2016. Wayback had nothing, Google cache was empty, but a paid service pulled the full page from a university archive that had indexed it. Sometimes the free stuff just isn't enough, you know?