Can't open backup zip

RapidWeaver Classic General
1

I’ve lost the RW files for a very large site. I found on the server a backup file created by RW. Opening that would save me a great deal of work, but the zip file will not open. Any suggestions?

2

Maybe obvious, but re-download it and try again?

3

Tried that and also tried different unarchivers. No luck.

4

Does your host back up the files on your server? Maybe there is a older version that is not corrupted?

This is sort of a long shot but can you try unarchiving on the server?

5

I’ve sometimes seen this happen. People send me RW project files in .zip format and they refuse to open with obscure error messages and codes.

Try a different un-zipper like The Unarchiver:

Quite often this has worked for me, when the Archive Utility in Finder has failed.

Might be worth a try.

6

Thanks. Tried Unarchiver.

7

That was a good idea, but it still would not open.

8

Are you getting an error message?

9

That depends on the method, but really nothing more than “unable to expand.”

10

Have you tried using the terminal?

  1. Open up the terminal in a window
  2. Type unzip followed by a space and the filename (with path)
  3. you can drag the file from finder to the termial window after you typed unzip and it should give you the proper path
11

@ctdkite There could be a few different things going on. Let’s cover the basics:

  1. You really don’t have another backup you can use? No Time Machine? No SuperDuper?
  2. How are you downloading the backup? From within RW? Or via FTP app such as Transmit?
  3. Based on your memory about what was the size (in Mb) of your RW project?
  4. Based on memory about how many pages were in your project file?
  5. Did you store “stuff” (audio, video, images, PDFs) in RW resources? Or did you upload them yourself and use a remote link?
  6. What is the size of your downloaded zip file?
12

I got:

End-of-central-directory signature not found. Either this file is not
a zipfile, or it constitutes one disk of a multi-part archive. In the
latter case the central directory and zipfile comment will be found on
the last disk(s) of this archive.

13
  1. You really don’t have another backup you can use? No Time Machine? No SuperDuper?

Long story. Stupid decisions on my part. Short answer no.

  1. How are you downloading the backup? From within RW? Or via FTP app such as Transmit?

From ftp. Transmit and then again directly from Little Oak. Since the RW file was lost, I could not use it.

  1. Based on your memory about what was the size (in Mb) of your RW project?

I don’t know. Probably large, but mostly text pages.

  1. Based on memory about how many pages were in your project file?

According to my sitemap generator, over 1800 pages. Those are just html and php pages.

  1. Did you store “stuff” (audio, video, images, PDFs) in RW resources? Or did you upload them yourself and use a remote link?

Images were usually stored as resources.

  1. What is the size of your downloaded zip file?

30.5 MB

14

Christopher:

Can you answer questions 3 through 6. They potentially are quite important.

15

Was the name of the folder something generally like this:

path-to-website-project/1C2ABB05-E6F7-464E-8C41-31C7AFBBCF24_rwbackup

I’m assuming “yes” but still useful to make sure that you aren’t barking up the wrong zip folder.

1 Like
16

Yep. E7015DD8-3036-4A61-858C-97ECC3CC7E54_rwbackup.

17

@ctdkite It’s too bad you don’t have an approximate memory of your project size. That would have really helped. But such as it is.

An average page for me (mainly text, some videos but all embeds, a few images) is about .7 Mb. That’s only used as a wild guesstimate. So if you had about 1800 pages that would end up being a project size of 1,260 Mb (or over a gigabyte). When RW zips a project file the zipped folder ends up being about 50% of the project size. In your case that would be about 630 Mb. Again … these are rough guesstimates.

… but if your zipped folder is only 30 Mb then you can see the obvious discrepancy. My guess (and it’s only that) is that the last backup to your server was not completed. It doesn’t matter why … perhaps you quit RW before the process was done (it would take a long while), perhaps there was a glitch on your sever that day, perhaps Mercury was in retrograde. Again, I may be wrong, but this is what it’s starting to look like.

You do have a published website. So at least you can manually pull in content and images. It will take a long time but it isn’t all lost. … and, of course, I may be wrong and someone else comes up with a great idea about how to save/find it.

However, in the future, having no backups is a complete disaster. Have one backup only, however, is still quite bad. What to do?

  1. use Time Machine or SuperDuper. Use them often and well.
  2. be strategic in how you name your RW projects. I create an archived set up RW backups. So I have MyWebsite-2019-12 and My-Website-2020-01. I’ve just duplicated the project file and given it a different name every 2-4 weeks. That means on my server I end up with a date archived set up backups.

I hope there is a way to retrieve all your info. I wish I had a better idea at this point: but the info you are providing seems to indicate your one zip backup is not a complete backup and was corrupted one way or another.

1 Like
18

Thanks for all the help and suggestions. It is true that that site and others I manage are still up. I just cannot change them at the moment. A couple of the sites needed a complete update and look. Maybe this will force me to build a better site from the ground up. I see a lot of copying and pasting text in my future . . .

1 Like
19

Get Stacks!!!

20

I use Stacks. Am I missing something? How would Stacks make rebuilding easier?