The Wayback Machine saved my deleted rant from 2019, here's the hack

I posted a long vent about my landlord in a local Facebook group back in 2019 and he threatened to sue so I deleted it quick. Last month I wanted proof for a housing board complaint and found the whole thing cached on the Wayback Machine at web.archive.org. Just type in the exact URL of the post, even if it 404s now, and try a few capture dates around 6 months after you posted it. Has anyone else pulled deleted posts from that site or is there a better archive tool I'm missing?

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lindaowens1mo ago

Wayback Machine is hit or miss honestly. Sometimes it grabs stuff, sometimes it doesn't, depends on if anyone's crawler swung by that day. Google cache used to be the move but they killed that a while back which still bugs me. For Facebook stuff specifically, archive.today tends to catch more pages than Wayback does, so try plugging the link in there too. Also if it was a public group you might get lucky just searching the exact text in quotes on a search engine.

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