Hello all, I was wondering if it is possible to restore a forum from cached pages on the Wayback Machine in an efficient manner. This was a forum that was hacked and taken down. My friend just told me he did not have a database backup, and his webhosts in Singapore (which aren't that experienced from what I've heard) dont' have a database snapshot either. I tried using this to extract what I could from there, but it didn't work: http://www.httrack.com/ Also, would anyone happen to know of software that will let me extract what's left from the webarchive to see what threads are remaining..sort of look at the entire site on my hard drive? Any assistance is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
I know there are scripts to crawl the sites, but they're written in python. I've done it some time ago for an smf forum, don't remember the details I'm afraid, only that it wasn't that difficult.
It's not a viable option to regain the content but to recall forum structure, get images, and rebuild the theme it's handy.
Would require a LOOOOOOOT of flipping through the "wayback pages" but possible if you are willing to spend time !
Yeah. Mind you though - you'd need to manually redo all members, their postcounts etc. as well. Definitely not an easy task!
Hello all, Thank you all for your input. The majority of the content is still there. I'm actually debating whether to hire someone to assist in scraping it for me, but am not sure how much that would cost. Also I wouldn't be restoring the forum exactly as is....I'm not concerned about usernames or images. I just really care about the content. Any additional insights would be helpful