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Recovery

Locked Out by a Hacker? How to Recover Every File From Your Site

Lost your hosting login or been locked out? If the site is still online, you can pull every public file back down — and keep your own cookies handy for the rest.

Recovery · July 7, 2026 · 6 min read

Important: this guide is for recovering a site you own or are authorized to manage. EZ Website Backup captures what a normal browser can reach — it does not crack passwords, break authentication, or exploit servers. If a criminal has locked you out, also contact your host and, where appropriate, law enforcement.

Losing your hosting or CMS login is gut-wrenching, but here's the reassuring part: if your site is still loading for visitors, every file it serves is still reachable. You can pull the whole public front-end back onto your own machine while you sort out access — so you never lose the actual content.

Step 1 — Grab everything that's still public

  1. Open the app and paste your site's URL.
  2. Confirm you own the domain when prompted.
  3. In Advanced options, raise Max pages and Max size so nothing gets truncated, and set scope to include subdomains.
  4. Start the crawl and let it finish.

You now have your pages, images, downloads, stylesheets and scripts — the material you'd otherwise be rebuilding from scratch.

Step 2 — Reach member-only pages with your own cookies

If you can still log in on the front-end (just not the host control panel), open your browser's developer tools, copy your session cookies, and paste them into the authenticated-crawl field under Advanced options. The crawler then sees the same member-only pages your logged-in browser does, and pulls those too.

Step 3 — Rebuild or migrate from the copy

With a complete offline copy in hand you can stand the site back up on fresh hosting, hand the files to a developer, or hold them as evidence of what was there. Because links are rewritten for offline use, you can also just open the ZIP and confirm nothing's missing before you act.

Do this now, not later: a locked-out site can be taken fully offline at any moment. The window to recover files is while it's still serving them.

Then close the door

Once you're back in control, rotate every password, review admin users, and — the lesson of the whole ordeal — set a recurring backup so you're never this exposed again.

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