Hi, I am really hoping someone can help me!
I went to update a site this morning, and when I opened it in Rapidweaver, it was an older version of the site (must have lost about 20-30 hours of work). The site is live and that is up to date - is there a way to download the .rw8 file from the server? does this get uploaded to the server when you publish a site? any help would be massively appreciated!
Have you set your publishing setting to backup to the server?
Or, do you run Time Machine on your Mac?
I didnāt know this was a thing 
sadly it is not turned on! and no i donāt run time machine! I am learning that I should be doing back ups the hard way!
Iād double check that you have opened the latest project file for that site. Part of the publishing process is to do a save (update) of the project file. So changes that got published should have been included in the project file.
@chatwood Per what teefers wrote ā¦ search for .rw8 in your finder. Then you should see all versions of your RW8 files.
ā¦ but yes ā¦ backup, backup, backup.
I have just done that and it is only showing the one file for this site! Thanks for the replies everyone - so do we think I need to start everything over again?
If you donāt have any backup like TimeMachine that you can check, then Iām afraid that youāll have to redo those changes.
You might want to āturn onā the publishing backup that Gary (@Ruyton) showed you. You also should try and get into the the habit of saving (Cmd + S) your project often.
You need to develop a backup strategy with something like TimeMachine and/or Backblaze.
This is where Iām confused - it was saved as I do regularly - but now the file says last modified 5th May - and I have made many changes since then and published several times etc - which I save every time - this is why I am so confused as to what has happened! Thank you all for the help and time though!
@chatwood So sorry for this experience. But there are reasons why backups are so crucial. Why it didnāt save? Itās a mystery in some cases ā¦ but itās important to be prepared for weird stuff happening (whether due to you, the computer, or other things).
An additional strategy I use, especially when creating new sites, is to create a series of date archived RW projects. So my first work might be named: project-2021-05-08.rw8, next is project-2021-05-15.rw8, and so on. Itās in these beginning stages that I find Iām most likely to delete stuff I really do want after all or make other dumb mistakes. Once the website is stable in terms of design then I might only change the archive date once a month or less. So I end up with more RW8 files, but thatās a very small price to pay.
This is great advice - thank you so much!! I have definitely learnt my lesson the hard way!
Depending on how well organised you have been with your site text and images, you could use one of the website āgrabberā apps such as Sitesucker.
This will download your whole live site and save it in the same folder structure as you created in RW. You cannot import this into RW, but when you are rebuilding the site, itās much easier to find stuff when itās nicely arranged. And all your images will be as per the website, so you donāt need to find them on your HDD and resize them etc.
This is what I do when Iām asked to recreate a website thatās been created in a different programme and I donāt have access to any of the content other than what is on the web.
See the screenshot below, the pages on the web are accommodation, contact, find etc and you can see that Iāve opened the accommodation āpageā and all the images are there in the download. It makes it much easier to recreate the site in RW.
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