Lost Theme and Projects

I’ve done a bad bad thing. I downloaded what I thought was an upgrade to a theme and loaded it into RW. To make this short, it overwrote 3 or 4 projects that existed in Themes. They are gone. When I try to open them I’me told that the theme no longer exists. I do have Time Machine running and I thought I could go to LibraryApplication Support/RapidWeaver in Time Machine and find the lost projects. When I go to Time Machine and Application Support there is no RapidWeaver. I have a sinking feeling I really did a no no. Can anyone save my bacon?

This is a bit confusing in that projects don’t exist in “Themes” so it’s very unclear what you are saying. Project files and themes are completely different entities… Do you not know where your projects are on your Mac? Do you remember their name so you can search for them?

I have the projects. When I loaded the project I received a notice that said the theme was not found. I had a theme called Creamy. I duplicated that theme and called it Creamy Jim, and Creamy Alice, etc. When I loaded an updated Creamy theme all the duplicated themes with Creamy in the titles disappeared. I hope that’s clear.

Did you duplicate while in the Themes window within RW? (Don’t ever duplicate themes in the RW FOLDER (in Mac Finder) where the Themes are located.

Yes I duplicated them in the RW Themes window.

I don’t know what to tell you then. I had a strange thing happen once when I changed themes on a project then deleted (from themes window) the old them. The project with the new theme did very strange things in Preview. I then re-installed the old theme and, even though it wasn’t used by the project, everything returned to normal. There must have been some “hidden” dependency on the old theme was shouldn’t have been there… (ie, bug or something).

But if you properly renamed your themes and reset all pages to the new theme in your project all should work fine. Go back thru your pages and make sure you have re-selected the new renamed theme on every page. Else I don’t know what to say…

What I think happened is that I went to Paddle and downloaded what I thought was an updated Theme that I had been using. I had a number of copies of that theme for the different sites I had built. The theme copies had the name of the theme plus the name of the person whose site it was. The theme I downloaded and dropped onto the RW icon asked me if I wanted to load the theme. I stupidly said yes. It was an old outdated copy of the theme and it deleted all the themes that had the name of the theme in the title. It didn’t matter that I had appended a person’s name to the theme, it deleted it. I know this because when I went to open the site I was presented with a dialog that told me the theme no longer existed. I have subsequently gone back to Paddle and find now the theme that I had purchased was now up to date. Downloaded the up to date theme, loaded it and now rebuilding the sites. Luckily the project files are all in order so it’s not all the problematic. Let me tell you though I now know how to title a copied theme. Thank you for trying to figure out what my problem was. This forum is most excellent.

Glad you got it figured out. I make regular backups of the RapidWeaver folder just for issues like this and for sure I dup the folder to have a copy of it right there whenever I do anything that changes it. (Even though I have several different kinds of backups.)