Google Apps Recovery: Restore Lost or Corrupted Google Sites Pages

If you haven’t used Google Sites recently, you might be surprised at just how much Google has matured the Sites application. Case in point: Google now supports both native versioning and basic undelete functionality for all Google Sites pages by default. Here’s how you can use Sites’ out-of-the-box functionality to repair or restore lost or corrupted Google Sites pages.

Scenario 1: Your Google Sites Page is Messed Up

Suppose that someone with access to alter your Google Sites pages has, how shall we say, aggressively rearranged the content, and you need to restore order to your design. Here’s how you can roll back a Google Sites page to a previous version.

1. Log into Google Sites
2. Select the Site you want to repair from your list of Sites
3. Navigate to the page you need to roll back
4. Click the More menu at the top of the page
5. Select Revision History from the dropdown menu
6. Browse the list of Versions and click on the one with a timestamp that predates the unwanted revision; this will bring up a simplified snapshot of the page as it previously was (basically, the page content with the template colors and fonts stripped away) so you can verify it has this version has the content you want
7. Click the Revert to This Version link

So what’s the catch? There is no bulk option for rolling back multiple pages to the same general save point. If a large number of pages have been corrupted, you have to roll back each page individually.

Scenario 2: Your Google Sites Page is Missing

The only thing worse than a damaged Google Sites page is a deleted Google Sites page. Luckily, Google treats Sites pages in much the same manner as Drive documents or Gmail messages—“deleted” doesn’t immediately mean “gone.” You can get recently deleted Google Sites pages back. Here’s how:

1. Log into Google Sites
2. Select the Site you want to restore from your list of Sites
3. Click the More menu at the top of the page
4. Select Manage Site from the dropdown menu
5. In the left column, select Deleted Items
6. Select the page(s) you want to restore from the list by selecting the associated checkbox(es)
7. Click Recover

There’s just one minor problem with relying on Google as a Sites backup system: Google only saves deleted Sites pages for 30 days. On day 31, your deleted Sites pages are permanently erased and completely unrecoverable from Google.