When you migrate sites across servers, sometimes you will face some problems in your apps due to compatibility issues caused by missing PHP modules, different MySQL configurations, etc.
But another kind of problem you may face is DNS issues, this is not the most common kind of issues, but they will happen from time to time eventually.
I’ve made literally more than hundred migrations and supervised other hundreds (if not more) over the past 14 years working in my web hosting company. And a lot of times customers point the IPs in a wrong way, using altered IP addresses or missing to update the correct record.
Once the DNS Propagation is done, unless you have backups of your DNS zones, there is almost no way to recover the old IP addresses from the records.
What can be done then? Is it the end of my job working at this company? Will my site be down forever?
Is there any way to recover lost DNS records?
Luckily, there is a fantastic tool called DNSTrails that will do the job for you.
DNSTrails is one of the best DNS tools I’ve ever seen. It is not only used to check out for historical DNS records but also to get valuable information from all your domains, IPs and much more. But hey, let’s focus on the subject.
If you want to recover lost DNS records, follow this steps:
- Move to DNSTrails.com
- Search for your domain name, example nixcp.com
- Search for the “Historical Data” block
You should see something like this:
As you can see, on the left IP addresses column you will find all IP values, current and old ones too, which is what you need.
On the top menu, you will find a quick way to switch between the different type of DNS records like A, AAAA, MX, NS, SOA, TXT and even Whois historical information.
All done, now you know a cool way to recover lost DNS records. If you also need advanced DNS, Domain and IP tools, check out SecurityTrails, the company behind DNSTrails.