Total and utter disaster has struck...

[BigDave]

I run Catalog on a Mac PowerBook using VirtualPC. The hard drive failed (just one month after the warranty expired!). After I installed & formatted a new drive, I found I couldn't import the site as the backups I'd made were corrupt. The hard disk may have been on the fritz for some time.

I called my client (whose site it is) and HIS PC hard disk had just failed too - blowing the only other chance I had of a backup. To make matters worse, the bl**dy web server in Manchester went down for a while too, taking the website with it. Customers got "general error" messages after the ISP went back online & were all getting very moody. What amazingly bad luck!

I managed to FTP the site back to my desktop in a blind panic and at least I now have all the images, scripts, html etc safe on a CD.

And I bet you can imagine the question I'm now about to ask: is there any way at all of importing the site back into Catalog? It will take WEEKS to reoriginate, as the client has over 600 products. Can anyone help? Or shall I just shoot myself? (it IS tempting).....

All help most gratefully received,
Demoralised Dave

PS I really thought I had it covered with 3 backups. How wrong I was - let this be a lesson to you all!

[I-CC]

Afraid it is not possible to recreate a site from the online files, as the local copies are constructed from details set in the local Access Db of the development or operational machine, and then end resultant generated pages and scripts uploaded, so destination stuff not development stuff.

If you have all of the images and text which you can copy off the current site, then that is something, but whilst the site is live it is using an encryption key which was in the old installation you had and without that exact same key (which will be different on installing afresh) you will not be able to download orders sat on the site.

The key would have been contained within a site snapshot, or if you at the very least have an old old copy of your site in a snapshot, then it will be contained within that, but without the exact same key then any orders on there now or placed in the future before you upload again will not be recoverable from within Actinic, so if this is a case of definately no encryption key for the live site, then maybe best to delete the scripts from the cgi-bin to stop people ordering at the least, so you can still get the images and text off the site...

Can a data recovery company not recover what you need from the drive, as a last resort maybe?

Sorry not better news

[spiceboy]

Yesss. Something similar happened to me when my friends daughter managed to kick the pc off the table onto the floor and damaged the hard drive that contained the only copy of the site - yep, no external backups. We tried to FTP a copy of the site but it would not run, so in the end we had a data recovery company retrieve the hard drive data onto a disk and ran the site snapshot saved from the hard drive through the catalog software. That worked.

Cost a few hundred quid and took about 2 weeks but it was well worth it - my site has around 2000 products.

And guess what? Now I make site snapshots regularly and save the entire site once a week on an external drive.

[NormanRouxel]

If you've made some Snapshots as backups. Try opening them in Winzip (they're basically Zipfiles - just rename them from .acd to .zip) or other Zip programs. You may be able to recover some information that way.

[BigDave]

Thanks all.
Sadly the disk data recovery is a non-starter, as my Mac repair guy tried low-level fornatted the disk when it started dying. All the data has been overwritten with zeros.

The annoying thing is that I actually DID have two separate backup procedures - and was sure that I was disaster-proof. Learn, everyone! Unkown to me my backups were corrupt and my client lost his when his pc went down.

I have managed to find a snapshot that imports ok, from November last year, so at least we can download orders. And I'll have to bite the bullet and start reoriginating the site in Catalog. AAaaaAAaargh.

[Marci]

As a precautionary measure, as well as using the inbuilt backup and snapshot functions, copy all *.mdb files from your Site1 folder to DVD-RW at the end of each day... As long as you have the mdb file, all you need after that is images to get the whole site back up quickly using stock templates.

[AdamL]

Sadly the disk data recovery is a non-starter, as my Mac repair guy tried low-level fornatted the disk when it started dying. All the data has been overwritten with zeros.

A low level format does not erase data. People often confuse the term 'low level format' with shredding.

Very simply: low level formats deal with hardware specific directory information, whereas high level formats deal with software specific directory information(such as the windows file allocation table)

Either way, whether low level or high level, the format does not erase the data.

The term you are looking for is 'shredding', in which the data is overwritten by a string of random numbers, or simply all 0's.

The reason why a low level format takes soo much longer then a high level format, is that due to the low level format being a hardware based operatin, it does a full surface scan simultaneously to erasing the index's.

The data will still be on your disc, or at least, the bits of your disc that are still readable.

[Litecube]

My Life Is Over

I doubt anyone can help having read all these responces to total loss of backups due to server and tapedrive failure . However I have a website sat all alone out there with no one to talk to....if anyone ever finds a way of backing up from a website to actinic...please let me know..a really bad start to christmas.

Fortunately I can take orders as i had a backup from a long time ago...the problem is that if i upload to the website i will be put back two years and a lot has gone on since then! Problem also is that I can not make any changes to the site price wise or anything else.....I so wish actinic had a cure for this..as you can imagine we are all pretty fedup here at the moment
Happy Christmas to you all
Nick

[Duncan Rounding]

In the New Year your best bet is to upgrade to v8 - go with a new design. You will be able to retrieve a lot of the text and images.

You may be able to retrieve data from the lost server - some companies offer this type of service.

At least you can download orders in the interim.