Tuesday 17 February 2015

Accessing Chrome's Cache

This is getting to be a bit of a theme on my blog.
Recovering files I've deleted or overwritten. Ooops

I've been working on some css all day and I've gone to merge some other work and guess what.
I overwrote the file with today's work.

Ooops

Windows 8 file history wasn't turned on and I had that sinking feeling in my stomach.
Since I'd been working in Chrome all day, surely it will have the css cached?

Well it turns out it's not like IE, in the good old days when each cached file was in plain sight in a cache folder. I could only find the HTML in C:\Users\%user%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache No sign of css or js.

But chrome has a page with cached files listed.

chrome://cache/

Ctrl-F found no files though.... Odd.

So I tried to find the file by entering the path directly.

chrome://view-http-cache/http://www.somedomain.com/templates/css/template.css

Bingo. Then you get some gobbledygook well the raw data from the web server. Kinda what you'd expect really.


From here you need to use this great website here where you can paste the data into the form and get the original file back.

Well there's 8 hours saved. Thanks Google.