As I’m sure many of you will remember, a few months ago Gear Diary suffered a server crash, and a whole lot of data was lost. Fortunately, some of the data (reviews mainly) was stored in Google Cache, a fabulous little repository of lost websites. Whilst very handy for recovery, it’s can also be of use when a website is down for maintenance or their server is temporarily offline.

Today I was trying to look up some information on XDA-Developers, and I found that they are having some kind of service difficulties. I was able to get to the page I wanted to view using a search on Google, then clicking the “Cached” button below the search result. Now while that is pretty easy, surfing between pages on the site can be a bit of a pain.

Since I use Firefox I figure someone will have created an ingenious little extension that takes advantage of Google Cache for surfing, and that was exactly what I found. Called CacheIt!, the extension let you right click on a link and view the last cache, or snapshot, of that page that Google took when crawling around the web for search results. Very useful if the site you need to access is down (or no longer exists).

It’s also compatible with Firefox 3!