Many Web developers work in mirrored site scenarios. Perhaps you have a laptop and a desktop you work from. Or maybe you work on both a staging and a QA server. In my case, I worked with a team where everyone kept a copy of the site on their hard drive.
If you do, you have to have some form of version control. What is live on the site needs to be what stays live - and as Chip discovered, things can get hairy if you upload the wrong version:
I work off of my laptop and desktop equally. I am usually pretty good about version control. I had problems with my laptop and had to perform a restore.
I few days later one of my clients needed a change to his home page. I made the change and uploaded the new root index file. He dropped me an email a few minutes after I uploaded the file asking about a few elements that were missing.
It was at this time that I realized that I hadn't worked on his site from my destop in a pretty long time. The file was way out of date.
To add insult to injury, I had done quite a bit of SEO work for this client and the index page was perfomring rather well. The info that I lost reflected about 18 months worth of work. It was gone forever.
I was beginning to get physically sick as I ralised what I did. I searched for the file frantically for about an hour everywhere and anywhere that I could think of... No such luck.
Then it dawned on me. Where I could find the file?
Every Web developer needs to be aware of this as I never really thought about it. Especially since most Web Dev's are not big SEO consultants. I am so it finally dawned on me where the file could be.
I went to google and checked their cached version of the file. The page had been speddered about a week before this so I pulled their last cache version and had what I needed.
Zip, bomb, bang. Back in business.
Google search- cache:www.site.com/index.htm
There it was...!
