website recovery

[emilia]

My hard drive backed up and I had to replace it thus lost all information on it. I had to re-instal Actinic 6 and now I don't know how I am able download my website from the server onto Actinic. Is this possible or do I have to build my website from scratch?
thanks

[fleetwood]

My hard drive backed up...

Hi Emilia

A rather unfortunate typo... if you had backed up your hard drive, rather than it having packed up, you would be in a far better position!

Its not good news I'm afraid.
Actinic builds your store from a database held on your local computer, then uploads completed pages to your server. The server itself does not hold a copy of the database, which is why its imperative to back up regularly, and store copies off site as well, in case of hard drive failure.

As far as I am aware, if you don't have any back up at all, you are looking at rebuilding from scratch.
You can retrieve your image files from your server, and completed pages, to use as cut and paste reference, but I think thats about it.
Hopefully someone else can offer something more positive.

[pinbrook]

Unfortunately I can add nothing positive, Martins reply is both correct and thorough

[emilia]

thanks

I have been irresponsible and it is impossible to recover any information from my old hard drive without CSI I may have done some back ups, but knowing this I will be doing it in the future more frequently.
Maybe it is time to give my website a new look.

thanks for your help

Emilia

[gabrielcrowe]

i'v written this tiny app, to help you a little.

basically, your catalog online is full of .cat files. these contain some data about your catalog. specifically your products.

what i did was, make a program that parses these files, and pulls out data about your items. then it constructs a primitive feed and then writes it to disk.

all you ahve to do is unpack it, and then, well, there are some instructions in there. put all your cat files into its data folder and click the button on the wonderfull one button interface. please only put .cat files in there, anything else from your actinic folder and it'll brake. you have been warned!

be aware that this app can only access the data in these cat files, so you'll only get the name of the product its price, the thumbnail used, if any, and its reference in actinic.

its a good starting point, and its worth seeing if it works for you, so you can build your catalog back up. the output file loads into excell, so you can add more cols, and paste content from your site, things such as the description and the image name, and such. these items arent available in the cat files, sorry.

this app was written in 45 mins, using visual basic 6. i cant give any support, but i can tell you that you need to make sure you ahve the vb6 runtimes installed, and that it worked for me on actinic 7, with over 1000 products, and on windows xp.

remember, its a cobbled together thing, that i'v just finished writing, so be patient with it.



edit: be aware that i'v found a problem with cat parsing (meow), if you dont have a one item per page catalog, it will fail. if your output is garbled, then you'll have to correct those items manually, apologies.