Broken Rapidweaver Folder

I have Rapidweaver 8.7. I am trying to make changes to a website that I have not touched for a couple of years. I cannot open the relevant folder, which appears to have been lost/distorted in changes of devices etc.
I have now managed to download the complete website folder from my hosting provider and (naively perhaps) assumed that I could open it with Rapidweaver, make the changes that I need, and upload again. It appears not to be that simple as I cannot open the downloaded folder either. Can anyone help me with this please and point me in the right direction? Many thanks

Unfortunately Rapidweaver cannot use the folders and files you have downloaded from your host, which of course IS your website, but not in the packaged ‘project’ format that Rapidweaver uses. When you publish your site Rapidweaver effectively unwraps the packaged project and publishes the structures you have now downloaded.

A few years back RW introduced remote backups, which sends a (zipped, I think) copy of the project to your host according to a frequency setting you can control. If you switched that feature on then there could be a copy of the project on the host, in among the files you have downloaded. Worth a look.

Without that I’m afraid its almost certainly back to the drawing board - but at least with a live site as a reference you’ll have a design blueprint to work from as well as the content to copy over. Not much consolation though if the site is large. On the other hand, if as you say the project is a few years old it might be a good opportunity to update it and build from scratch.

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Thank you for your very helpful message. I did find a zip file of the same name on the host which I have downloaded (Archive Utility). However, when I try to open it with Rapidweaver, I get the message “unable to expand…Error 1 No such process”. I guess I am missing something. Is there anything else that I can do to resolve this? Many thanks

You mean when you try to open the .zip with RW? I doubt that would work.

What do you get when you unzip the file?
If its a .rw (or similar RW project file extension) then try to open that with RW.

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It is a rw8.zip file, which I tried to open with Archive Utility and The Unarchiver and both will not open the file. It appears it is corrupt. I think I will have to revert to your original suggestion of starting again. Thank you for your help, but I guess the backup file process is not as reliable as I had hoped.

What happens if you double-click on that zip file? You Mac should unzip it by itself. Then look for the THE CANARY ISLANDER.rw8 file than has come from the compressed zip file.

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Like this:

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No, sadly it didn’t do that, with Archive Utility, so I tried The Unarchiver instead, with the same non result.

Thankfully, I remembered that I could ‘Go Back in Time’ on my Time Machine, which I rarely use. Thankfully, the complete file is there and it works! I will be more careful to do backups in future and not reply on the built in Rapidweaver one.

Thank you for your help!

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