This is getting rather obnoxious. This particular issue has happened approximately a dozen times over the last few months, and while it is never catastrophic it has become a time waster and needs a resolution.
I’ll be working on a project when all of a sudden none of the resources can be found. There is no change to anything outside of rapidweaver, yet none of the resources can be found.
This is what I’m confronted with, time and time again. It doesn’t seem to matter what I’m up to… moving a stack, adjusting a menu, going to preview. There doesn’t seem to be a trigger… they’re just gone. Time and time again. Please help.
Never heard about resources disappearing all of a sudden as you work in RW.
Are you sure that you did not rename the original resource or moved it to a different location? Perhaps you have your resources stored on an external drive that is not mounted? If you have your resources in the cloud, perhaps your Internet connection got interrupted?
The first few times I thought that maybe I had moved some files around and hadn’t remembered, which is why this has been ongoing for a few months.
Yesterday, I was simply building a page. Stopped for a minute to look at the other pages on the site when I noticed the videos weren’t working. Looked at the resources and found them all in the condition shown in the picture in the original post. It’s really odd.
Also worth noting, sometimes if I reboot the computer and reopen RW the resources will return. On other occasions I have to replace all of the resources.
To be honest, I do not use the “Resources” feature in RW at all – to save myself from a waste of time and predicaments similar to yours. I keep all my resources (images, videos, PDFs, graphics) stored on my server in a separate folder named “warehouse”. I use their URLs to reference them in my projects. Meanwhile, my “Resources” folder in RW stays empty. For me, this is the best solution.
For this method to be relevant, you need to use a FTP app (Transmit, Filezilla, Yummy, CyberDuck, etc) to upload your resources manually to your server. Besides that, the use of a separate FTP app for publishing will save you tons of grief and wasted time over the built-in publishing engine.
Perhaps my method will solve your problem indirectly…
You may want to seriously consider 2 alternatives:
warehousing all your resources and using URL links to them when developing your pages
in the new RW (7.5) there is the ability to link to warehoused resources. I forget how this exactly works, but search for 7.5 news and it will be explained. I have not used this method yet as I use method 1. But this seems to be a fantastic additional option to RW.
Bottom line: last time I used Resources in RW was over 7 years ago. Not reliable enough for me.
Just to have another perspective - I often use RW Resources since then I don’t have to re-link files when moving the project out of the test server, and I’ve never had any problem at all, sometimes with more than a hundred files including large audio or video files.
David: Certainly makes sense in your case. And if it works that’s all that matters.
I don’t use a test server so any link I create stays there. Relinking would be a big pain. But since you use Resources you may have some better insight into what’s happening with Ross. It certainly has to be a frustrating experience for him and I can’t help troubleshoot the situation effectively (aside from previous comments).
Unfortunately I don’t have any further troubleshooting advice for Ross’s problem as I’ve not had any problems with resources. From his descriptions it seems like a hard problem to suss out as it is intermittent and also sometimes fixed by a re-boot and sometimes not fixed. I guess it might be helpful to know what versions of OS X, RW, Stacks, etc. as per usual troubleshooting, and also check the forum for ‘disappearing resources’ which I will now do just out of curiosity.
[edit] After searching the forum I found a few relatively old references to a similar problem with resources, but no solutions. So can’t say conclusively, but it does not seem to be a common problem. Perhaps best to ask @simon for his help with this.
Only had two occurrences since my last posting. On both of those occasions the resources returned on laptop restart. Thank you for the various suggestions. Too bad I still don’t know the cause of the craziness. Besides, there are bigger fish to fry. Ever since I updated stacks yesterday RW freaks out in preview… when in preview the page reloads continuously with maybe a second break in between reloads. Don’t expect you guys to help tackle that. Just popped in to say thank you.
