I have been a registered SiteSpinner user since 2006. During the last 3 years I have been slowly learning and building a website. The project has many pages..... much, much effort.

Usually when i open the SiteSpinner program there is a window pop up listing the 4 or 5 *ims folders that I have in SiteSpinner and I easily spot my main project and open it to work on it.

It had been a couple of months since I opened SiteSpinner.
Today I opened the SiteSpinner program and the "Open Project" window shows folders for "My Documents"..... this is usually not what I see upon opening SiteSpinner. I looked through everything and could not find my project, which is called HEARTSROARBANNERS.

I thought I saw a brief message about an "invalid path" for HEARTSROARBANNERS. I pushed O.K. then tried again and cannot even find the invalid path message again.

I did a SEARCH through files and folders for all *ims folders in "My Computer" and 3 of the *ims files show up, but NOT the one I need... not the HEARTSROARBANNERS file which is the website I have been building for 3 years!

This happened once before and somehow I found it again.... I have absuolutly no idea how I accidentally found it that time... so I am still a little hopeful. But when I type HEARTSROARBANNERS in the SiteSpinner "open project" line, it says that no such *ims file can be found.

The only thing I can think of that might have caused the invalid path message is that I very recently overhauled all "My Pictures". Most of those pics were recatagorized and renamed. Dozens of those pics were also used on the website project. Could this have created too many invalid connections to the project?

I have already given myself the "should have made a back-up" lecture. I am just sick about not being able to locate my extensive project.
Are there any possibilites to finding it?

~ Kimmy

You say you have searched “My Computer” for *ims. Did you use a period between * and ims?

Try going to Start > Search > For Files of Folders. In the Search Results window, click on “All files and folders”.

In the “All or part of the file name:”, enter *.ims Don’t forget the period, it is the ims extension you are looking for.

Now click on “More advanced options” the check “Search system folders”, “Search hidden files and folders” and “Search subfolders”. Leave the “Case sensitive” and “Search tape backup” (unless you have one) unchecked.

Now click “Search”. If your file is on your computer, that should find it.

If for some reason the file extension has accidentally been changed, try the above exercise again, but this time enter “HEART” in the All or part of the file name section.

You might also find a copy of the project in your local publish folder. And/or, if you used SiteSpinner to upload, and you left the default auto-backup on, there should be a copy on your site.

More on backups.

Postyr and Bruceee, thanks for the responses.

I tried Postyr's suggestion and I did find a reference to the file. When I clicked on it to open it, I got this pop up message :
The item 'HEARTSROARBANNERS.ims' that this shortcut refers to has been changed or moved, so this shortcut will no longer work properly. Do you want to delete this shortcut? Yes or No."

I push "no". and the box disappears.

By the way,
I tried Bruceee's suggestion of looking in the publish folder. Even though I had not yet published the site to the web the default auto-backup was on. I just didn't know what to do when I got there.
When i go to sitespinner's main work screen and i click on the "FILE" button in the upper left corner, the scroll down menu shows HEARTSROARBANNERS.ims listed among the few projects. When i try to open it, I get this message (along with a yellow triangle with a "!" on it) :
C:\Documents and Settings\Kim\My Documents|Site Spinner hello world experiment\HEARTSROARBANNERS.ims contains an invalid path.

It is frustrating to get the impression that the file is right there, but I just can't get at it. It has been "changed" or "moved" or there is an "invalid path" ... but it's there.
I never did anything, to my knowledge, that may have "moved or changed" it.

~ Kimmy

The shortcut you have found is simply that, a shortcut in the preview folder that was placed there when you previewed the project.

If you scroll down the search list further, you should see further mentions of it. Firstly in My Computer, then again where it actually is.

That is, of course, so long as it hasn’t been accidentally deleted (or renamed). If it has been deleted, the search should also find it in the Recycle Bin.

If you right-click the shortcut link file and select Properties from the menu, you should see where the actual find should be located on the Shortcut tab in the Target field. Since the shortcut link cannot open the original target file, you must have either deleted it or moved it. As postyr stated, maybe it is still in the Recycle bin and can be restored.

It's starting to look not very hopeful. If you have never published to disk or to a site, then you will not find a project file there.

Don't, whatever you do, delete your SiteSpinner preview folder or its files. You should still have your previewed html pages there, so if the worst has happened, it should be possible to recreate your project from those.

We humans do strange things that are beyond words... strange sounds we make... laughing, crying, or giving an involuntary shout of delight and relief, which is what I just did when I found my project. In the recycle bin I found a folder called sitespinner hello world experiment. I don't remember ever creating that folder, but i did remeber that being mentioned in one of the "invalid path" type messages I got when searching yesterday. So i "restored" that folder and when i opened SiteSpinner, although my project wasn't listed, I saw a few new options that weren't there before. I opened the "recent activity" option and saw my project listed among a long list. It had .lnk added to the end (after the *.ims) I tried to open it and it worked. THERE WAS MY PROJECT! But after I closed SiteSpinner and then reopened it, my project was gone again. So I repeated the whole process; but this time when my project was open I hit the "File" button in the upper left corner on the sitespinner work page and I picked "save as" from the scroll down menu. Then I saved my project in the "My Documents" Folder (*ims only ...getting rid of the .lnk that had somehow been added).
I closed sitespinner, reopened it, went to "My Documents" and WALLAH, there was my project... all of it, back again and ready to go!

I am so ecstatic and relieved I feel high.
I want to thank you all sooo much for helping me!



This experience really shook me up. After so much frustrating effort over the past three years; of trying to learn, of trial and error, of squeezing in late hours after work to slowly piece by piece try to build a website (which was like a dream) to display my artwork.
Then to suffer the loss. Yesterday I cried because of my ignorance and also because of my foolishness at not having made my own backup copy somewhere.

I would NOT have figured it out with your help and I might have given up.
You may have changed the course of my destiny.
I have another chance now.
I have learned my lesson and I will immediately make a back up.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, so much!
Your knowledge and efforts really helped me.
God bless you.
~kimmy.k

Thank goodness you recovered it, Kimmy! My heart was pounding as I read the above posts...as I've been there before!

On 2 occasions, although I had backups, they were utterly useless as they couldn't be recovered/read by anything other than the gadget I had. So copies on my PC were of no use. I lost many years of work/memories and as I now have memory difficulties it would have been nice to have something to trigger a few.

We all do it ... or rather, don't! BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP!! I now have two large capacity USB hard drives and back up to them (not as often as I should!) as well as data to discs.

I also use 'imaging' software to completely copy my entire hard drive so it's much easier to restore.http://www.terabyteunlimited.c...mage-for-windows.htm

My neighbour has spent days rebuilding his hard drives, downloading all the updates etc, re-inputting access codes etc etc. Using an 'image' or a 'ghost' is so much easier.

It sounds as though the loss of your project would have been a major disaster! I repeat .. thank goodness you recovered it!!

mccifa

Well done!

Mccifa's excellent advice is worth repeating for us all:

quote:

BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP!!

I made several type-o's in my last post.... in particular I meant to say that "I would not have figured it out without your help"...

A few years ago the cooling fan in my hard drive housing box broke down and I hadn't noticed it. After a while components in the unit "melted" resulting in complete hard drive fry-out. I took the hard drive to high cost pro's in my area and for $120 they recovered nothing but about 10 severly pixelated (ruined) photos. I lost everything. Years of work, writings, letters, and worst of all photos.
You would think I would have learned from that experience and educated myself concerning how to make back-ups. I sincerely INTENDED to... but time rolled by and I, wearied of having to continually struggle to research and try to understand overwhelming and large piles of info and choices regarding pc OS's, just let it go.

mccifa, I could really relate to your story about losing memories... it's like a house-fire that destroys, leaving none of the things you took for granted until they were gone.

I have never bought any type of back-up device.
I really don't know much about them, which is why I have not made back-ups.

I have WinXP Home Edition. I have not yet published anything to the web.
For overall back-up, what simple, effective, quality device would you recommend.... I mean, I will look at mccifa's link to terabyteunlimited, but I'm concerned that it may be over my head. I'm not very advanced in pc technology.

In regards to a SiteSpinner website project, what type of back-up is good for website building program projects?

Are there any articles I should read which any of you guys have written or know of?

Thanks again ~ kimmy.k

If you want to create an entire disk mirror image, I recommend Acronis True Image. I purchased a Thermaltake BlackX docking station which allows me to use a bare hard drive of the same type as the drive I want to mirror. I found this the best way to backup the C drive as is saves me time from restoring all my installed software (which could take days). If my C disk crashes, I just swap drives and restore anything I've done between mirroring.

For my weekly scheduled backups, I use ShadowProtect. I have had no problems using it in an unattended mode.

To perform spot backups of individual folders, I use SyncBackSE. They have a free version which I have not tested so I do not know what limits it has, but the retail version is only $30 and worth the money IMHO.

The Thermaltake BlackX docking station accepts 2.5- and 3.5-inch bare hard disk drives (HDD) which run about $50 less than USB external drives. So I keep several drives handy and swap them in and out of the docking station as needed.