Hi Mike,
Sorry to jump in here a few hours late – my name is Isaiah and I’m the developer of Stacks.
Firstly, I’d love to have a look at an earlier version of this file if you have it. It sounded like you did from the posts above – but after downloading both links they appear to be the same – or very similar. Both seem to be missing many images.
If you have a copy of the file prior to the issues, I think it could be very helpful and potentially help in resurrecting the file.
Second, I think it would be good to try to understand what is happening here. Often in the past when I’ve seen file corruption issues, there are some other utilities or or “cleaners” that have, noticing a large cache directory “cleaned” it of images.
Utilities like CleanMyMac, MacKeeper, and MacCleaner – when run while RapidWeaver and Stacks are open and working can be aggressive when they see a very large cache of images. Running these when RapidWeaver is closed is fine, of course – but removing cached images while RapidWeaver is open can affect the integrity of the file.
But lastly, I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk a bit about the file itself. Even without many of its images the file weighs in at 1.1GB. I suspect that with the remainder of the images it was substantially larger. This is, in itself, can pose a problem – at least sometimes.
Saving, copying, and publishing such a large amount of data takes a considerable amount of time, can eat a lot of memory, and if really bring an otherwise fast computer to its knees but mostly, well… there may be better and easier ways to get the job done.
Although I don’t think this is the source of the problem, I do think it could (1) save you a lot of times and (2) just eliminate the problem ever happening again.
Image Warehousing
Since most of the vast size of your file is not pages or layout, it’s just lots of pictures – warehousing could cut the project down dramatically.
Warehousing is when you upload your images in a central folder on your site just once – then instead of dragging the images into RapidWeaver you provide the location of the image in your warehouse.
There are, of course, many stacks that make it as easy – in fact even the stack that you are using “Gallery 3” has a built in way to link to a folder of images. This makes adding new images as easy as uploading them to a folder. You don’t even have to open or upload the RapidWeaver project.
This would likely make your site much much smaller, quick to publish, and much easier to work with and as a side effect it would avoid any future issues with missing images.
I should also mention that there are lots of folks on the RapidWeaver forum that probably have many ideas and suggestions for how to best transition to warehoused images.
