Big UGLY Crash

I had one of those big ugly events occur, one that I have had nightmares about since…I hope someone can help…here goes.

I lost all my websites on this side and when I went to pull them from the server, I realized I cannot DO anything with them…I am gonna have to rebuild 12 or so big sites if I cannot figure this out.

I used Data Rescue II to find lots of files, but it does not support Freeway Pro…James Wilkerson hosts my sites, and he was stumped…

Ideas? Help? Valium?

THANK YOU!!!
KathyDV


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I had one of those big ugly events occur, one that I have had
nightmares about since…I hope someone can help…here goes.

Oh, no. Bad luck. What exactly was the crash? Failed hard drive…
OSX corruption?

I lost all my websites on this side and when I went to pull them
from the server, I realized I cannot DO anything with them…I am
gonna have to rebuild 12 or so big sites if I cannot figure this out.

Presume this means you have got the HTML files off the server but
have lost the Freeway files off your computer. In emergency you could
try opening the HTML sites in another programme that handles HTML,
Dreamweaver for instance, to keep them ticking over.

I used Data Rescue II to find lots of files, but it does not
support Freeway Pro…James Wilkerson hosts my sites, and he was
stumped…

When you say it doesn’t support Freeway Pro what does that mean - it
can’t see the files? What files related to your old sites did you
manage to find, ie JPEGs, Gifs etc, if any? Did you retrieve the
Freeway Backup file(s)? Have you tried any other rescue programmes
such as RescuePro or Techtools? Maybe they can find stuff that Data
rescue can’t.

Pete


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On 7 Dec 2007, at 17:08, KathyDV wrote:

I am gonna have to rebuild 12 or so big sites if I cannot figure
this out.

Okay, first a deep breath.

Next, there are a couple of ways to achieve this.

To get you up to speed fairly quickly, I’d go for the following:

  1. Open the existing live sites in a browser. Resize the window to
    something close to how you created the site in Freeway, and screen
    grab each page - or one representative page at least.

  2. Open your favourite bitmap editor, and fade the screen grab(s)
    back 50% or so. Save them as JPEGs.

  3. Create a new Freeway document, and use the screen grab as a page
    background image on a master page. You should then be able to place
    guides, boxes for content and so on.

  4. Drag images from the site while it’s open in the browser window
    directly into Freeway’s page. Obviously, these will only be the
    images that were published, but they’ll do until you can retrieve the
    originals in some form or another.

  5. You can also drag text out of the browser window, but you may find
    it better to drop it into a text editor for some cleaning up before
    importing into Freeway.

Here’s a KnowledgeBase link which more or less says what I just said!

http://www.softpress.com/kb/article.php?id=207

Hope that helps, and good luck.

Heather


“Freeway - Web Design for All”


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On 7 Dec. 2007, 4:08 pm, KathyDV wrote:

I had one of those big ugly events occur, one that I have had nightmares about since…I hope someone can help…here goes.

This is something everyone dreads, I had a medium crash the other week and lost one of my new sites, fortunately only a couple of pages, but my mac was very unstable.

However I had luckily bought a copy of Superduper only two months previously and a laCie firewire drive and had used it to make a bootable copy of my entire drive.

Although I lost a few days production my drive was exactly as it was before.

I did not post this to make you feel bad Kathy, only to highlight the importance of making a good, solid and regularly updated copy onto a separate drive. I know data rescue is good but a clone is so much simpler.

I actually have two backup drives now and the time it takes to do it is well worth the effort.

This applies to all of you Mac users out there who do not have a bootable backup !

Superduper will clone your hard drive and then it does a smart update whereby it only updates anything new, you can set it to backup at shut down time and then it will do it’s thing and shut down your machine - and it only costs $27.95 very cheap I think

and from what I can see it is better than time machine on Leopard

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/

Hope you manage to get sorted Kathy

Best wishes

Gary

PS I am not on commision sales for superduper !


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Sometime around 7/12/07 (at 12:08 -0500) KathyDV said:

I lost all my websites on this side and when I went to pull them
from the server, I realized I cannot DO anything with them…I am
gonna have to rebuild 12 or so big sites if I cannot figure this out.

I used Data Rescue II to find lots of files, but it does not support
Freeway Pro

Data Rescue II will rescue any and all files that it can see, whether
or not it knows what they are. Unknown formats won’t work with the
special filtering methods, but an all-out scavenge won’t be held back
by that.

I’ve used that utility to rescue files that were made by software
programs that I’d written myself, so there’s no way it could have
known anything about them!

But even so, even the very best rescue software won’t always rescue
the data you need. :frowning:

What you’ve just found out is that Freeway documents are NOT the same
thing as the HTML files that you make from them. The Freeway site
document is a high-level, data-rich document that contains far more
information and design ability than HTML possibly can hold; you just
publish (i.e. export) your web pages from it.

Your web pages are like polaroid snapshots of your actual layout;
they don’t give you any more than the basic 2D view, whereas the
original layout contains far, far more data and potential.

Sadly, this means that importing HTML documents into Freeway is
rarely satisfactory. You’re often better off remaking the sites
again. On the plus side, with a little thinking ahead and the use of
rationalised master pages this can progress rather faster than you’d
think possible.

Good luck! And MAKE BACKUPS! Not just of your Freeway documents, of
everything that you don’t want to lose. One good way to do this is to
buy and install Leopard and set up a large external drive for use as
the Time Machine backup.

k


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Agreed, k! I run one 1TB BU drive and use time machine with it, and also use SuperDuper and make weekly BU’s on another 250GB drive and keep that one in my safe, and in addition, for really important stuff I will upload the data to my host account which is off-site.

You just simply can’t be too secure!

Loren


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THANK YOU ALL!!! I appreciate all the great info SO MUCH. You guys are great! I will fill you in a bit though…

I do believe that our house was wired by drunk monkeys on crack, as things seem to happen electrically quite often. My husband is in the process of rewiring, but hunting, fishing and more fishing often gets in the way of mundane stuff like rewiring where we live. So we had a burst that blew out some stuff and even though it was on a surge protector, my trusty Maxtor gave its life for the cause. I sent it off in the hope that i could get those files back and was w/o external hard drive for a teeny bit. We are over an hour from town and have had a couple of big snow storms, so I just procrastinated…

Then as I was pulling my website files with Transmit I STUPIDLY clicked on mirror and then to top it off, missed the folder i had created on my desktop and before I could stop the process POOF my desktop was gone.

So, it is a bizarre and pitiful story of loss and sadness. SIGH. I guess I need to re-read The Secret WHILE backing up my files even better. I am also considering activating a .Mac account to have some off site protection…

I will say Data Rescue II was GREAT for recovering my Photoshop files, not so good on InDesign. It was well worth $99. FreewayPro was just not on their list of recognized files. The odd part was all the pictures it recovered that I had never ever saved…like stuff I looked at on Yahoo news. Trust me, I never downloaded pics of Paris Hilton! I must be naive, as I had no idea that is what browsers did…

Thanks again, I am working with your input and thank you all again.

Kathy


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Sometime around 8/12/07 (at 11:46 -0500) KathyDV said:

we had a burst that blew out some stuff and even though it was on a
surge protector, my trusty Maxtor gave its life for the cause.

My house was hit by lightning last July. Fortunately, I use a UPS
(uninterruptible power supply) device, basically a chunky, managed
lead-acid battery that sits between devices and the wall socket. This
gives perhaps 10 minutes grace if there’s a power cut… and it also
provides the kind of surge protection that can make some simpler
surge protectors look like damp paper bags.

Nothing that was protected by the UPS was affected. The things that
were powered on but not protected… well, the insurance agreed to
replace them, thank goodness.

I wrote a UPS technical briefing article for MacUser a while back.
You can find it here:
http://www.thesmallest.com/lessonettes/ups-indepth.html

The odd part was all the pictures it recovered that I had never ever
saved…like stuff I looked at on Yahoo news.

Yahoo is… well, ‘evil’ is a bit harsh, but terribly mercenary and
frequently underhand probably covers it. (Aesthetically shallow too,
although that’s a different kind of complaint.) I don’t like using
it, although popup blocker features in browsers can make a big
difference.
And of course on a less grumpy note, whatever web page you see
(whether you meant to visit it or were fooled into clicking a link)
will write stuff to disk in the browser’s file cache; that’s how
browsers work.
Attachments and other embedded stuff in emails, including spam, are
also quite likely to crop up in file rescue lists too.

Basically, anything that’s ever arrived on your Mac in one way or
another will reside on the disk in data form even if thrown away,
UNTIL that ‘marked as empty’ space on the disk happens to be used
when some other file is written.

If all of a file you threw away is still not overwritten then it can
normally be salvaged. If just part of it is overwritten, some of it
may still be rescuable, depending on the file structure of the
document. If all of it is overwritten, it is gone forever.

k


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I believe Time Machine will be the saviour for a lot of Mac users in the near future. This is very thoughtful technology. I now have a backup running every hour, every day and every week when I plug my Macbook Pro into my office set up. Something I’ve NEVER had previously. I also have bought these small black external Western Digital notebook size drives at my local Costco store. 250 gigs in a package about 1/2" x 5" x 3" for only $139 each. I just archive my stuff to those and keep in my bag. No power supply to deal with so simply plug in and drag the files. I then back these up monthly to a 500 gig external 3.5" drive I got at Micro Center for $100. Amazing how cheap this safety net has become.


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OK, one more quick question. I have been investigating some of the file recovery programs and none say they support finding Freeway Pro files, do any of you have first hand experience with any of these programs that DO recover FP…or what do I look for if I am using DataRescueII or any of the others…

THANK YOU!!!

Kathy


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Sometime around 8/12/07 (at 21:49 -0500) KathyDV said:

I have been investigating some of the file recovery programs and
none say they support finding Freeway Pro files, do any of you have
first hand experience

I have first-hand experience using all the major disk and data
recovery tools. Here’s the low-down: data recovery software Just
Recovers Data
.

Just search for all files rather than using options that attempt to
sniff out specific types. Sure, that method can help avoid the need
to sift through masses of different items, but that’s just a
convenience - not a requirement for data rescuing.

If you try all of DataRescueII’s options and it still can’t find your
files, I’m afraid your files are almost certainly not findable at
all. It is possible that the space where your files were is
overwritten or corrupt…

k


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Keith,
When you say search for all files, I fear I do not even know where to begin! What do I look for that would let me know it is a Freeway Pro piece of data…

Sorry to be so elementary, but I guess I am! I did run the recovery search for all data, where do I look now?

Thanks as always,
Kathy


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Kathy
Has Data Rescue put all the files into a folder such as Recovered or
Rescued or one that you have created for the purpose? If so you can
search for files by type using OSX search tools. If you have Tiger
you have Spotlight. You could search for .fwbackup files. Also the
original Freeway files on my Mac don’t have a suffix but they show up
as Freeway files in Spotlight if I enter “Freeway” in the search bar.
Once you have found one or two they may lead you to others grouped
into folders or areas in your rescued files.
Cheers
Pete

On 9 Dec 2007, at 16:30, KathyDV wrote:

Keith,
When you say search for all files, I fear I do not even know where
to begin! What do I look for that would let me know it is a Freeway
Pro piece of data…

Sorry to be so elementary, but I guess I am! I did run the recovery
search for all data, where do I look now?

Thanks as always,
Kathy


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Thank you, Pete. I will say…I picked up a program called FileSalvage and it has actually recovered several of the Freeway Pro files! It has a section where you can define what it is to look for and then it will look for that type of file. It found several of my sites. Now, I did not get complete sites back, but I DID get the mater pages, which is a lot better than starting from scratch…pretty good for $79.

So, this is looking up a bit. I will also go look again for anything that MIGHT be a freeway file, but I had done that using Spotlight already…thank you!

Kathy


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If you have not got immediate access to a spare drive but wants to duplicate important copies for safety’s sake, can also use a service like http://www.humyo.com to copy files onto. Its free, and you can store up to 5GB. The more copies you have of important files the better :slight_smile:

On 8 Dec 2007, at 16:46, KathyDV wrote:

So, it is a bizarre and pitiful story of loss and sadness. SIGH. I guess I need to re-read The Secret WHILE backing up my files even better. I am also considering activating a .Mac account to have some off site protection…

David Owen
Printline Advertising ::
Freeway Friendly Web hosting and Domains ::
http://www.printlineadvertising.co.uk/freeway/

On 8 Dec. 2007, 1:22 pm, thatkeith wrote:
One good way to do this is to
buy and install Leopard and set up a large external drive for use as
the Time Machine backup.

Keith, or other venerable Mac experts…

One question re: Time Machine.

A client of mine has just bought a big G5 Mac with two 500 GB hard drives lots of ram etc. I know she is going to ask me to help her as she wants to keep a backup of everything on the second drive. I am waiting to get a new Mac myself next year so as yet I have not had chance to dabble with ‘the leopard’ so I do not know the answer to this yet…

Q: I have been told that time machine does not make ‘bootable backups’, but that it only backs up your data. does anyone know if this is correct please ?

if so I think I might get her to get Superduper instead which I know certainly does.

comments appreciated

Gary


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On 13 Dec 2007, at 17:32, diarbyrag wrote:

Q: I have been told that time machine does not make ‘bootable
backups’, but that it only backs up your data. does anyone know if
this is correct please ?

This is correct, however when you install Leopard it has an option to
recover data from a time machine backup so it’s not really a major
issue.

– Finlay


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Q: I have been told that time machine does not make ‘bootable backups’, but that it only backs up your data. does anyone know if this is correct please ?

I had a need to boot from my Leopard disk a couple of days ago to use the Disk Utility to repair some Permissions, and saw the option their to “Restore from Time Machine”, so my interpretation of that would be that it would restore your complete system as well as all of your data and preferences to an exact state as of the date of backup. However, I would say that it doesn’t make a bootable backup.

When Time Machine is first run it takes quite some time to do a Backup and that’s using 1TB Raid 0 backup drive. What it did was do a backup of the whole system, and from that point on it merely backs up changes, and very quickly I might add.

I also run SuperDuper to another drive for additional security, and that one is bootable.

Loren


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Time Machine does not create bootable backups. You need to restart from the Leopard DVD and “Restore from Time Machine” as Loren described.

That said, Time Machine is incredibly useful for recovering individual files you might have accidentally deleted, or backtracking to an earlier version of a file if you’ve gone down the wrong path.


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Q: I have been told that time machine does not make ‘bootable backups’, but that it only backs up your data. does anyone know if this is correct please

Thanks for the prompt replies, I think I will steer her down the time machine route as it sounds a little easier for a Mac newbie ( her not me ! ) and there will no doubt be more help available for her within within the Apple OS docs as I do not want to be a 24 hour Mac helpline for her

cheers

Gary


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