Can you recover tracking data that got filtered out by URL?

When we set up our site in Matomo months ago, we configured it to “Only track visits and actions when the action URL starts with one of the above URLs.” Then a few weeks ago we changed our URL, and forgot to change the setting to account for the new URL. Now we’re missing weeks of tracking data.

Is there any way we can recover this tracking data that got filtered out due to not matching the URL? Is it still stored somewhere, or does it never get saved at all?

Thanks in advance for any insights anyone has!

Hi,

The point of the setting is to not store any data at all, so nothing is stored. But that doesn’t mean all hope is lost.

When you look at the access.log of your webserver for the Matomo domain (not the website tracked), you can see that there is all the data that got sent to your Matomo instance.
And the Log-Analytics script has a hardly known feature to replay this data (so send the same tracking requests again to Matomo).
https://matomo.org/faq/log-analytics-tool/faq_19221/

Hi Lukas,

Thanks so much for this info! I really appreciate it.

Unfortunately, I just checked our Access Logs and it looks like our server only holds onto them for a few hours. This might be a lesson in the importance of logging & backups, sadly.

If you have any other insights I would appreciate it, otherwise thank you for your help!