How to recover a website when you get the contents.plist does not exist

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1

I went to open a site I did a few months ago and I get a message saying contents.plist. does not exist.
Is there is way to fix this?
I will be really annoyed if I have to start from square one and redo the site.
The site is on my network drive.

2

Hi Dave, and welcome to the forum.

Unfortunately, I think you’re going to be ”really annoyed” as to my knowledge there’s no way to recover from the error that you are having other than restoring the project file from a backup like TimeMachine.

If you have published the site and have turned on the backup feature in the publishing settings then there should be a backup of the project out on the web server.

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So do you know what causes this error?
I can still access the site via FTP. What file would I look for?
Thanks
Dave

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You should see an oddly named directory at the root path like
8CC91A11-891B-4CFA-B418-BCACDA894FAF_rwbackup
Inside that directory you should find a zip file containing the project file.

I have no way to say for sure. It’s a corrupt file. A Rapidweaver project file is a particular kind of folder called a package. It contains many files that are used to make the project work.

Lots of people seem to have had trouble saving projects to cloud drives like Dropbox or OneDrive. I’ve seen a couple of folks have issues with NAS drives.

The safest way is to save to your local drive and then zip and copy the file to the network or cloud drive. And of course, scheduled backups with TimeMachine or similar process.

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5

Thanks,
I guess I have lost it then.
I was able to manually fix the online site with Editplus so I will start all over again with a new project. Not pleased.
Thanks Doug

6

Hi @ve7hr

Not sure what time zone your in but drop me a message I have had this happen quite a few times and might be able to help you out!

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I am on the West Coast of Canada. PDT.
Any help is appreciated.
Luckily it’s a fairly simple website. But it’s a couple hours of work at least.
Thanks
Dave

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If you are able to zip your project file and send this to me, I can also have a look into the package (as @teefers correctly called the RW project file/folder).

Cheers
Jannis

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