Sorry for this very basic question. Spotlight is not working on my Mac. I have a project file that I am working on with no problems, but I cannot locate where Rapidweaver has stored it. It’s not in my documents folder with other projects. So what I was thinking was I could export the project to my desktop, change the name of the exported file, import that file back into Rapidweaver, and store that new version in my Documents folder. Then I would simply work off of the renamed version AND I would no where it is. It seems a straightforward idea, but I am not understanding where Rapidweaver stores project folders. Any advice? Any problems I might run into?
Do a save as
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That’s it? No need to export/import? Save as will be much easier! Please confirm!
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If you do another Save As… (with a new/another file: it needn’t have more than a single ‘dummy’ page), RW will show you where it ‘likes’ (where its default location is) to save its files.
Then if all is well, the two locations (that of the Save As, which you will just have performed; and that where your previous - otherwise, temporarily ‘lost’ - file is) will be the same.
Good luck!
(It’s also almost certainly worth getting Spotlight working too.)
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Nope, like mark says, it will actually show you where the current one is and give you a chance to save a new one.
The project file is what RW uses, not the export.
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Are you still able to open this project from within RapidWeaver? If so, cmd-click (right-click) on the file name in the top, center of the project window. You should get a drop-down menu showing where the file is stored.
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Found it! This worked like a charm! Thank you so much. Really helpful to know where the file is. Just to be clear, if I do a Save As on my open project to simply to change the name of the project (let’s say from cow to moose),can I then open the project as moose and all settings will be the same and I can just go from that?
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Stewart,
The original suggestion about ‘Save As…’ was not actually to save a real project; but to locate where RW saves by default.
Yes, if you (re-)open an existing file and Save it as… something else, you are essentially creating a duplicate, a new copy of the original file. That you can then open and use as though it were your original, only with a new name. Given that, it usually makes more sense to Duplicate (Cmnd-D) the file in the Finder.
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I not trying to be rude or smart but if you are at a position where you don’t understand files/folders/saving/opening then you realistically need to watch/read a few MacOS beginners guides, especially ones that focus of Finder.
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I am actually somewhat familiar with all of this stuff. The reason I am being super careful about all of this is that I had an incident with Rapidweaver 4 a few years ago that was a disaster. I went to open my website project that I use to make a living, and for a reason no one could ever explain to me, it would not open. It crashed every time I tried. No one on these forums had any idea what had gone wrong. In the end I had to completely recreate the website by copy/pasting from what I had up on the web, with >500 links, etc. Took a long time. In this case I got some strange error messages that I had never seen before, so paranoia set in that I was going to have to redo a different but complicated site from scratch all over again. That’s why I’m checking so carefully. I’ve tried with apple to figure out why Spotlight has stopped working, and have gotten no good explanation from them either about that. It will search the web, but not my hard drive.
Thanks for all of the advice!
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Stewart,
In Spotlight System Preferences > Privacy make sure that your startup volume, usually ‘Macintosh HD’ is NOT in the list of devices for Spotlight to ignore.
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Make sure you setup backups. At a minimum, you should be running Time Machine. This way you always have something to go back too.
Many of us will also use the duplicate command in Finder to create a manual file-level backup before opening a project that will get extensive changes. Usually just once a day, but could be done more often.
Between the duplicate projects and Time Machine backups, you should be pretty well covered.
Btw, this goes for any documents. Photoshop, Word, etc. They can all have issues at some point. It’s good to have TM creating backups in case anything goes wrong.
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Macintosh HD is indeed NOT listed under privacy with spotlight. I dragged the HD icon onto the privacy page, then removed it to force spotlight to reindex itself, but it does not appear to have accomplished anything.
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Good advice. I do have a backup drive, and I used SuperDuper to maintain that as a carbon copy of my main hard drive. Just have to remember to back it up a bit more often. It has the advantage (as I understand it) of being a bootable drive, so that if my hard drive fails in my computer, I can get right back in business using the back up drive. How do you handle the bootable disk issue in case of a complete hard drive failure?
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If this doesn’t help with Spotlight (it should), you might want to try software like HoudahSpot to delve a little deeper.
SuperDuper has a reliableSchedule function…
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Personally, I keep a bootable clone of my main hard drive that I create with CarbonCopyCloner (similar to SuperDuper). I also use Time Machine. TM gives me hourly backups for the past 24 hours and then daily backups for a pretty long length of time (don’t recall off hand). I think the two solutions complement each other pretty well.
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If you ever want to see exactly where a file is located, simply right click on the file name in the app’s title bar. You should see the full path to where the file is on your system. If you click on any of the folders, it will open in Finder. This works in any app on your Mac.
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That sounds ideal. Is it possible to do this on a single 1 TB back up drive if I have about 350 GB on my primary hard drive? How would I go about this? I assume it requires some partitioning of the backup HD.
Thanks, Stewart
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Thank you. Someone else also pointed out this trick to me, making it easy for me to locate my project file. Appreciate your help!
Stewart
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Yes, you could partition the hard drive and use the second partition for TimeMachine. I do this on several drives. A quick good should get you detailed instructions.
With the price of hard drives, I’d just get a second drive for TM. This gives you two backups on two different drives. Extra redundancy never hurts.
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