Website Project‎ > ‎

Sites Revision Tools

Google Sites capabilities for managing the site include:

Page Revisions

Google Sites maintains a revision history of page edits allowing you to 
  • view
  • compare, and
  • revert to former versions.
More Actions -> Revision history

Deleted Pages

When you delete a page, Sites removes it from the active site and places into a 'Deleted Pages' area where it's retained for 30 days (Similar to how Google treats deleted email).

This is a practical safety feature which offers some 'peace of mind'.  

More Actions -> Manage Site -> Deleted Items

Subscribe to Changes

Since a site can have multiple editors/owners you may want to know when other people are making changes to the website. 
  • Google Sites has a Subscribe to site (or page-specific) changes capability that notifies you when changes occur. 
  • Receive Email - whenever anyone makes changes you'll receive an email message showing the page edits
More Actions -> Subscribe to Page Changes
More Actions -> Subscribe to Site Changes


Deleted Sites

Google retains deleted sites for 30 days before permanently deleting them from your account.
  • To access your deleted sites go to: sites.google.com and in the sidebar select Deleted sites 
  • You may restore or permanently delete site here. 

Backing Up

Sites are hosted in the Google cloud and has been quite reliable. But it's still worth considering backup options. Two ways to backup a site are:

Site Copy

A built-in Copy this Site feature makes a duplicate of a Google Site within your account.

More Actions -> Manage Site -> General -> Copy this site

A duplicate is peace of mind against wild editing errors, or even accidentally deleting your site.  A duplicate is also helpful when you are interested in cannibalizing some content from one site into another site.  Then you can cut-and-paste and rework content without fear of damaging your original site.

If you are worried about your account getting hacked and then losing your site (when it or your account is deleted), do the following:
  • Make a copy of your site - using the above steps.
  • For the copy share 'owner' permissions with 2nd Google Account.
  • Delete your permissions (then only the 2nd account has access to the 'Site Copy'
Note the Site data is still in the Google cloud.

Export with Google-Sites-Liberation

Google-Sites-Liberation is an import/export tool for Google Sites.  Read about its capabilities, user manual and download at Google-Sites-Liberation   See also:  GitHub

Comments: 
  • Personally I run an automated script weekly that backups up my sites. However, the script/tool doesn't work for all my sites - some have errors and their backup fails.  Note, I've never needed to use any of the backups.
  • This tool doesn't appear to be very well supported.
Unfortunately, Sites is not included in Takeout (Google's primary data export toolset).  

Issue (May 2015):  This tool currently does not support private sites.  Google transitioned to 2 step authentication (OAuth2) for accessing private sites in 2015-Q2.  Unfortunately Google-Sites-Liberation does not support OAuth2, The tool has an open feature enhancement request to add this functionality.  August 2015 - it may have been fixed in GitHub, I haven't used the new version yet.