What's with all the .rw8 files (as folders) showing up?

RapidWeaver
#1

Ok, so I have my project on a Synology NAS with a mounted volume over SMB.

This makes sense as I’m also using the Synology to run an in house web server for testing and whatnot prior to deployment which saves me having to FTB stuff on my not so great outbound internet all the time.

My project lives there, with various subfolders for the resources, and stuff that get added to the project as I progress.

Lately, I’ve got a whole mess of iconless folders with the project name.rw8 cropping up in this folder. Appears to be related to saving, but I have no idea what they are there for and there’s tons of them.

Screen Shot 2021-08-19 at 6.22.38 PM
Screen Shot 2021-08-19 at 6.22.38 PM1816×724 116 KB

What kind of Amy Winehousery is this? Can I safely nuke them?

#2

This post might help understand what your seeing:

#3

@thang

Thanks. And yeah, I’ve seen that error as well (sometimes, but not always).

I’ve already moved the project file itself over to another internal SSD that has APSF formatting, so hopefully that’ll cure the issue.

I do see messages from apple supplied apps (like TextEdit and Preview) when I save to the NAS that say something about the mount not supporting persistent storage or some such which will preclude the ability to go back to previous versions, which I’ve never used anyway (I change the filename and include the date for this purpose, old school coder practice), and that works fine.

Oddly, there’s zero issues when using other apps that also use the folder bundle format for saving (like Logic and even other non Apple 3rd party apps) so it’s a tad odd that it’d be happening with RW, as they’ve been generally pretty good about the minutia of MacOS stuff (as evidenced by the Safari SVG tab thing and other little bits most software vendors aren’t even aware of).

And I’m already using the NAS for the time machine thing. I do have to say that springing for a 8 bay Raid 10 Synology was one of the brighter things I’ve done in a very long time. I’ve got a 48tb volume with an installed hot spare that’s been running 24/7 for almost 3 years now without a single issue.

Besides being able to use it was a LAN based web server for development (I can load an entire site in less than minute vs. the 20+ it takes to push off to the production server) is worth the price of admission alone.

All our video content is on it, my entire 2500+ album collection, some 40,000+ RAW camera files in Aperture libraries, all my cad and 3d priting work, etc, and the whole private cloud thing is awesome. I can access any of it, from anywhere in the world on any device. It’s a great bit of kit and the peace of mind in knowing I’d have to have 3 drives all fail simultaneously (and probably 4 due to the hot spare) before I’d lose any data is a godsend, particularly as I don’t have the worlds fastest outgoing internet so a cloud backup scenario with that much data just isn’t practical.

#4

I have seen the same issue when saving MS Word documents across a network to a Windows 10 machine (so SMB as well) The issue resolved when I updated to Big Sur. Not saying it’s the same issue but it looks similiar although I don’t get why the folders all have the same name in your case.

#5

If I remember correctly, there some kind of file or folder “flag”, which is lost when storing on NAS. Sometimes this also happens in iCloud folders. Maybe @Doobox remembers.

1 Like
#6

xattr -rc /path/to/thestack

Run this code in terminal.
This will remove all extended attributes recursively from the stack, and you should see it revert to a familiar stack icon file.

2 Likes
#7

Thanks, tried that. Didn’t work on the files sitting on the NAS. It did end up postpending a bunch of semi random characters after the .rw8 extension.

However copying those folders to an internal drive and deleting the pospended characters DID revert them to a normal RW file.

What it looks like is these were all interim save files, as the “real” one with the icon on the NAS had the latest mod date and all the rest were prior to the last save, and the farther back the mod date went, the smaller the file size. Diving into the package folder structure this appears to be the case as pages and stuff were added.

I’m now working on it entirely on an internal drive and just backing up to the NAS, but keeping the resources (graphics / fonts / etc) on the NAS’s project folder. Seems to be working ok thus far.

#8

Which is exactly what was happening when I saved Word documents. Curious as to what version of Mac OS you are running. As mentioned the issue seemed to resolve after a belated upgrade to Big Sur.

#9

11.2.3. Can’t go past that as it’ll break opencore and bad things will happen. Running on a 5,1 2010 Mac Pro tower.

#10

I’m running 11.5.1 but that was my first install after Catalina so maybe somewhere along the line the SMB interaction got fixed. I just deleted the spare folders.

#11

FWIW, it’s not just happening on NAS drives. I’ve had it now occur (announcing This document’s file has been changed by another application since you opened or saved it. and saving the project as folder with an RW8 extension) on both the boot volume and a second internal SSD, both of which were formatted as APSF. It doesn’t seem to be happening as frequently as when on the NAS but it is still happening.

This on Big Sur 11.2.3. Being as I went from Mojave directly to Big Sur, I have no idea if this occurs under Catalina or not.

#12

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.