Can't find website file on hard drive

I need to make some changes to my website. I bought a new computer and apparently lost that file while changing over to the new computer. Is there a way to find the file name by looking at my website online? Or, is there a way to download my website to my hard drive? Using RW8 on a Mac. Thanks. the url: consciouscounseling.net

@sagemom You may be in bad shape but here are some things to check:

  1. Do you still have the old computer? The project file should still be on the old computer.
  2. The extension for a RW8 project is: .rw8. So you could do a search for “.rw8” and see what pops up
  3. RW has an built in way to back up your website project (i.e. the RW8 file) to your server. If you took advantage of that option, then you can download from your server.
  4. Finally, people should always, always, always have backups. I’m hoping you do. It could be a backup hard drive using Time Machine. Or Cabon Copy Cloner. Or another product that does similar things.

Thus there are 4 general ways to find your project file. You’ll need to provide more details but if you have a copy then we can likely help you find it.

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@sagemom One of the wonderful, but underused, features of RW8 is the built-in backup feature. See screenshot below:

I’ve set the frequency on mine to “Once a Day” but there are other options available also. If you had this set up then you’ll be in great shape!

If it’s on your Mac but you can’t find it, try using finders search by file extension feature:

The file extension varies by RW release, you haven’t said what version you are using.

This feature also should work with TimeMachine, so you search your backups

If you didn’t turn on the backup feature of publishing (it’s off by default) then you need to find it on your Mac, on your old Mac or from a backup like TimeMachine.

Yes, I have the old computer. I opened every RW file and none of them are the version that is online. How would I know if RW backed it up?

@sagemom See screenshot above.

When you say “none are the version that is online” I’m assuming these are older versions of the same website? If so, then use the “newest” older version and check the settings per the screenshot above.

What is the date of the newest RW file you have? What’s the time difference between that version and what you think is the newest version latest update? Are they one year apart, one month, 3 days? You should be able to see last modified date using the Mac OS finder.

Yes!!! I did have it set to backup daily and I was able to download the version that is online. Thank you!! Now, to resolve the missing files error messages!

@sagemom Ugh! Missing files is a big pain in the behind. Hopefully you don’t have too many of them. Typically they refer to images that you imported into RW. In fact there are 2 different ways to import “stuff” into RW. See screenshot below.

In general you want to set “Site Resources” to “copy into the document”. (There are exceptions to this such as sites with a huge number of photos.) I am assuming you have the setting to “leave in place”. This essentially means that RW “remembers” where the file is on your hard drive for each specific image, audio, etc. Since you’ve changed computers, and possibly relative location within the HD, this is the most likely reason you are getting this message.

But first check that setting. If you do have “copy into the document” as the setting then that leads to a different sort of solution.

I was able to download the website from backup but 3 photos from the home page are missing. I downloaded the photos from file manager on my host’s site. But, the captions are missing and not sure the theme is actually working (the photos move on the home page). It is working on the services page as the photos and captions are there and moving. Any way to download just the homepage to see if it downloads everything?

Not completely sure what you mean. It looks like you have some sort of slider or gallery stack. It seems all you need are the images (which you state you have) and to add the missing text which you can see on the website. But there’s no way (that I know of) to simply download the home page and insert into RW.

However, this does seem like a relatively easy fix. What stack are you using on the Home page?

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