Help! I've lost my blog!

[frannbug]

I have been writing a daily blog using iWeb for more than four months but have hit problems recently. First, I had publishing problems which were solved by removing the cache folder from the library of my home folder. This happened twice during the last week.

My last problem, however, is proving much more difficult to crack.

My Domain file has become unusable. I opened iWeb and instead of my blog and my other site (photographic) opening, the loading progress bar appeared and then nothing. I tried to restore one of my very many Time Machine backups of the iWeb folder to the Application Support/Library/Home Folder; but a message came up that I didn't have permissions to replace one of the files. When I then tried to open iWeb, all pages up to day 72 were restored but none of those beyond that date. I believe that may be when I upgraded to iWeb '09 from the original version that came with my computer in 2006.

This is a really difficult problem. Whenever the blog gets held up, some of my readers presume I've given up writing it and stop bothering to look for it any more. Yet all the files are still there on my iDisk so there must be some way of opening them in iWeb! If there isn't, might it be possible to get them going without too much extra work in some other application like Quark Xpress Interactive Designer, perhaps?

The only way ahead that I can see at the moment is to re-install both the system and iWeb and to copy and paste everything back from the published version. However if I do that, the hit counter records and the comments will be lost.

Can anyone offer me any suggestions, please?

 

[angelwatt]

The iWeb site file is located in /Users/user/Library/Application Support/iWeb/Domain.sites2

That's the file you need to try and recover from Time Machine.

unfortunately, iWeb has no way of importing a published site. It's very much one-directional. There's been a few threads on that. Using iWeb created pages in another program can be done, but very hard to edit and will likely require a decent amount of wb design knowledge to get going.

 

[maflynn]

Do you use Time Machine to backup your system? If your domain file has indeed become corrupted then restoring a backup is your only option. Thankfully the way TM works you can go back to a specific day or even hour and retrieve that one file w/o reinstalling everything.

 

[frannbug]

Domain.sites2 permissions?

That's precisely the file that caused me problems. I thought Time Machine would fix my problem but it only copied up to day 72 across and the rest was barred because of my supposed lack of permissions. Might it be possible to fix this permissions issue somehow, given that nobody else has higher permissions than I, the owner of the computer?

I find it very annoying when messages come up telling me I don't have sufficient permissions for something. It ought at least to give me the option of typing in my password instead of just blocking me, or if what I'm trying to do is dangerous, to explain why I shouldn't. In this case it just seems totally unreasonable.

Thanks for your responses to my question, angelwatt and maflynn.

 

[maflynn]

Did you try navigating to the specific folder on a given day in your time machine backup within finder to see if its there or not?

Perhaps this permissions issue was partially the cause of the file being corrupted as well?

 

[frannbug]

Permissions

Thank you very much for your help so far.

I'm not sure what other way there is of restoring a Time Machine backup: I opened the Time Machine menu, entered Time Machine and navigated to the last backup before things went awry. I selected the iWeb folder that contains Domains.sites2 and clicked on the 'Restore' button at the bottom. The folder was then partially copied across but suddenly stopped and told me I didn't have sufficient permissions to copy it. I then repeated the process with the previous backup copy and worked my way back a few times before concluding that they were none of them going to allow me to copy the file across.

I have to admit that other things were going wrong with my computer on Saturday morning. An awful load of programmes were unexpectedly quitting and I couldn't get the hit counter to work on the previous couple of blog entries. In an attempt to get my blog up and running I opened it in another log-in and copied the iWeb folder with the domain in it to the other log-in. There must have been corruption on the files as it wouldn't work in the new log-in either.

However I went back into my normal login and duplicated a page that had a working hit counter. I made this just how I wanted it as a master page/template and saved it with a date that preceded the start of the blog. I copied it twice for the troublesome entries and copied all of the content into these two new copies, deleting the old ones. This solved my problem: I saved, published and checked the web pages and found all was working. Then I noticed a mistake in the content and tried to correct it. At this point iWeb unexpectedly quit and I couldn't open it any more until I managed to restore the partial blog up to day 72.

Is there anyone out there who knows a way I can get this Domains.sites2 file to work and its permissions to allow me to copy the backup copies across, please? I'd be sooooo grateful!

 

[angelwatt]

Three ideas to try.

1.) Use Disk Utility on the Time Machine volume and check the permissions with it. Perhaps it can find and resolve an issue for you.

2.) Use Terminal to try to force the move that currently says you do not have permissions.

1. Open Terminal and type in "sudo cp " without the quotes and do insert a space at the end.
2. Then from a Finder window showing the Time Machine backup, go to one of the Domain.sites2 files and drag it to the Terminal window. This should create the path to the file for you.
3. Enter a space in the Terminal window.
4. Now from a Finder window with the iWeb folder where the current Domain.sites2 file should exist and drag the file to the Terminal window, which will again create the path for you.
5. Hit enter.
6. It'll ask for your password (you'll need to be using an admin account).
7. This should hopefully force the permission issue and copy the file into place.

3.) Terminal again, but trying some other mojo. Using the Domain.sites2 file from Time Machine for the following commands. For the drag file piece below, it's like I explained in #2 above. These are two separate commands so do one at a time.

sudo chown 0:80 Drag_file_to_Terminal_window
sudo chmod 775 Drag_file_to_Terminal_window

After this, try to copy the file from Time Machine again.

(Quick explanation of the first command: ensures root:admin (owner:group) permissions so the system can access the files.
Second command: adjusts file permissions so you and your group have read/write/execute permissions.)

 

[frannbug]

angelwatt
Three ideas to try.

1.) Use Disk Utility on the Time Machine volume and check the permissions with it. Perhaps it can find and resolve an issue for you.

I'm giving this another go after a frantic period of family sickness. Sorry I've taken so long to get back!

I've tried and tried but the permissions buttons in Disk Utility are always greyed out. I think I need to give the external disk an owner. However, there doesn't appear to be anything on the Get Info panel that allows this. I tried starting up from another external disk (actually I tried starting from the Time Machine external drive, but that doesn't seem to be an option any more. I may have removed vital system files to free up more space); this made no difference. I even tried adding administrators to the Sharing and Permissions section but that made no difference either and now the option to make a new owner in the cog at the bottom is gone. Before it went I tried to add a new owner but none of the names I put in were valid, whether they were the user name, my log in name or anything else I could think of.

Repairing permissions would appear to be the easiest method of sorting this problem. I find Terminal rather scary!