Viewing cached files (Mac)

[mitrailleuse]

I am trying to view the contents of a Web page that I visited around a week ago. All I want is some text—no images or anything fancy like that. I've done a bunch of Web searches, and it seems like there used to be some cache-viewing add-ons for Firefox in the past, but they are no longer available. I've tried the "about:cache" route, but that's of no help at all.

Incidentally, I'm using Firefox 48.0.2 on Mac OS 10.6.3. Is there any easy way to recover the file I'm looking for? Unfortunately, the Google cache for the Web page isn't available either. Thanks for any info.

[therube]

Oh, just guessing...

Set FF to "offline" mode, then try to load the page from URLbar dropdown history (rather then from typing the URL into the URLbar).

[mitrailleuse]

Thanks, therube. I had tried that, but it didn't work for me either.

Surely there's some way to retrieve the older temporary files?

[kerft]

I don't know if these work, or if the restart needed to install an extension will further lose your data, but here are some old cache view extensions:
https://legacycollector.org/firefox-add ... index.html
https://legacycollector.org/firefox-add ... index.html

[mitrailleuse]

Thanks, kerft. I'll give those a try and see what happens.

[mitrailleuse]

I tried the add-on—thanks. It's pretty cool to have, but unfortunately doesn't help that much. It seems that you can only view cached entries that are less than about 30 minutes old.

Oh, well—maybe there's no straightforward way in Firefox to obtain text from a cached file that's older than a day or so. Still, you'd think there would be.

[kreemoweet]

There's this third-party application, part of the excellent NirSoft utilitiy collection: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/mozilla_cache_viewer.html

This program works only on Windows, but it's said that it will also work on Firefox cache folder contents copied from a non-Windows system.
I'm not clear on whether it will show the unencrypted content of files transferred via https.

Have you tried the WayBack Machine? http://web.archive.org/

[mitrailleuse]

>There's this third-party application, part of the excellent NirSoft utilitiy collection: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/mozilla_cache_viewer.html

>This program works only on Windows, but it's said that it will also work on Firefox cache folder contents copied from a
> non-Windows system. I'm not clear on whether it will show the unencrypted content of files transferred via https."

Thanks for the info, kreemoweet. Unfortunately, I don't have access to a Windows machine.

>Have you tried the WayBack Machine? http://web.archive.org/

Yes, I've tried that, but it doesn't have what I'm looking for.

Incidentally, what I'm actually trying to find is an Amazon review that got deleted a couple of weeks ago. When I do a Google search, part of the review shows up in the Google "snippet" view, but unfortunately there is no cache. I guess there's no way around that?

[mitrailleuse]

Woo-hoo! I was finally able to retrieve the text that I was looking for!!!

I'd had a review for a book on Amazon that I'd originally written in 2007. Since that time, I've edited it many times, so that it became a really LONG review. Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, Amazon capriciously deleted it (I won't go into the unfair reasons here). I contacted their Customer Service, and they forwarded the matter on to their Communities department, who unfortunately seem to be perpetually out to lunch. To say that the Communities department is pathetic would be an understatement. Suffice it to say that I don't ever plan to buy anything from—or review anything on—Amazon again.

Anyway, Web Archive had an older version of my review from 2011, which was extremely out of date. However, I was able to find the "permalink" URL for my review that way. Then I did a Google search on that URL, and (hey, I got really lucky here!) there was a cached copy of that URL!!!

The cache was from April 27, which was completely up to date. Anyway, I'm so happy I finally got what I needed. So, I don't need to view the Firefox cache to get what I need now after all.

[therube]

Guess what else, you're now more likely to make some backups of potentially important information .

[mitrailleuse]

"Guess what else, you're now more likely to make some backups of potentially important information ."

Exactly! Well, I normally do, but who'd have ever thought that Amazon would suddenly delete a review that was over 11 years old??? I certainly didn't see that coming.

So, folks, if you any of you have any long reviews/comments on Amazon (that you care about) and you don't have backup copies of them, please make some now. Amazon has now become so capricious that they could delete them at any time. (Oh, and don't ever try to contact the Communities team over there—they are worse than pathetic.)

Yes, I like to think of this all as a big learning experience.