Lost my web files

[John Ahern]

Hello,
I have been making my web pages with Publisher 2000 and I recently lost my
original 17 pages due to a hard-drive failure. My web site is still up and
running but is there anyway I can retrieve my pages for redesign and changes
or am I bound to start from scratch again?
Any help appreciated please. John

 

[DavidF]

John, John, John...

I hate getting this question, but probably not as much as you hate the fact
that you did not backup your files. I am sorry.

I am also sorry, but the best you can do is download your web files to your
hard drive, and start rebuilding your pages. At least this will give you the
images, and the text. You could probably copy and paste a lot of it...

As of Publisher 2002 you could open a .htm file in Publisher, save as a Pub
doc and rebuild one page at a time, but unfortunately that does not work in
Pub 2000. While it is too late for you, others should take the time to read
the following article by David Bartosik before their hard drive fails or
they loose their Pub file in some other way. It describes some good backup
approaches and the way to reconstruct Pub files from web files with Pub
2002+:
Common Sense Computing 101 aka "Why in the world would you lose your
publisher file?":
http://msmvps.com/blogs/dbartosik/archive/2006/01/19/81461.aspx

Since David wrote that article there have been some other advances in
technology and the web that help in backing up. External USB drives and USB
sticks have come down a lot in price and are excellent for backing up. I use
the USB sticks to backup work in progress, and make full backups of my data
to external hard drives on a regular basis. I also use Acronis True Image to
backup my whole hard drive, copy it to an external drive, and can install
that image to a new hard drive in just an hour or so. And finally, there are
an increasing number of on-line sites that you can store your files
(including your own web host). I ran across http://www.dropsend.com/
recently and like www.yousendit.com it allows you to upload large files and
send links to others, plus with dropsend they give you 250 MB of online
storage...all for free. Of course this won't work too well if you don't have
a high speed connection.

Anyway, once again I am sorry John, but hopefully others will learn to
backup from your experience.

DavidF

 

[John Ahern]

Thanks DavidF,

I actually did a 'clean and reinstall' of the hard drive and I did not
realise that all the files I had stored in desktop folders would vanish - I
transferred everything (or so I thought) onto an external drive and was
surprised to find my webs had vanished along with all my Outlook Express
since 2005 (when I had my last computer upgrade).
Luckily I have found an old (2005) version of my web with most of the pages
still intact (to some degree). Complacency is a bugger - and the older you
get the more you don't realise how time flies between backups!
In the meantime I'll stick with my 2000 version - I use the 2003 for other
work but I found the 2000 is better for web as I had BIG problems when I
tried to upload and use the 2003 some years ago.

Thanks again, John

 

[DavidF]

John,

That is great news, and I won't suggest that you "upgrade" to 2003. I have
all versions and still use Pub 2000 myself for webs. Though there are some
advantages to the newer versions, the Pub 2000 html code is more basic and I
am able to more easily to get good cross browser compatibility. In fact
while there are some new issues with Pub webs and IE8 RC1 and the beta
versions, but my Publisher 2000 webs are not affected.

I do remember your website and the famous socks <grin>. If I might I do have
a recommendation or two as you rebuild or update that old Pub file. When you
built that site, IE dominated the market, but now it is down to about 68%
and FireFox has about 22% of the browser market. If you aren't doing it
already, I would suggest that you download and install FF and test your site
against it. It is a relatively small download and as long as you opt out of
choosing it as your default browser, it shouldn't create any problems on
your computer. And most importantly, if you can get your site to work well
in both IE and FF, it will work in Opera, Safari and most other browsers.

Though your site works pretty well in FF, I noticed a couple things that
would work better if your tweaked the formatting and layout. For example
your main menu links are killed in FF because you use the shaded text box.
Amway, comeback if you decide to do this and we will be glad to help.

Also one other suggestion. I am guilty of the same complacency about backing
up, but have gotten better recently. I bought a new Seagate external hard
drive and it came with some great backup software. In the past I manually
backed up files because I didn't trust the backup software I saw. This meant
that I missed some files and didn't do it often enough. This new software is
great. You set it up once, choose what files and data you want to backup,
and then just hit the button before you shut down at night. You can even set
it up to do it all automatically. I think the software is a free download
from their site and should work on non-Seagate external drives. You might
check it out.

Nuff said...see you next time.

DavidF