Reverse Engineer .web From Published html?

[Technoir Design]

Here goes a tale of woe...

I came back the other night to find my house had been burgled. Various stuff taken, including my laptops. One had a client development site on it. Most of it has been published to the webhost but of course I have lost the original .web files and thus have a challenge to get back to where I was...

For some reason the thieves left my remote hard drive, so I do have a rather out of date .web backup but there is a lot of work missing. That will teach me to make backups more frequently.... talk about learning lessons the hard way!.

I have already looked at the xarazone tutorial regarding how to manually create a .web duplicate of an existing webpage. That may be my only option. However, before I take that route I wondered if anybody knew of an easier (hopefully, automated way) to generate/reverse engineer .web from the published .html.

I'm not feeling too hopefull at present but the alternative of doing all the work by hand again is almost too daunting to bear. It could be weeks of solid work..


Fingers crossed but not exactly 'holding my breath'.

...and folks, learn from my mistake, keep backing up regularly and keep that copy safe somewhere.

Best Regards

TD

[steve.ledger]

Wow, that is bad news - very sorry to hear that..
Sadly there's no way to convert an exported html website back into a .web file other than using Ima Guest's method at the Xaraxone which you've already viewed.

A tip I can give you though (too late this time) is to upload your .web file to the same place as the website. Alternatively, get yourself a free DropBox account and save your .web files to your dropbox folder on your HDD, these are automaticly synced to your online Dropbox space.
Very handy.

[angelize]

I just had a look at Dropbox that looks very handy Steve.

[Technoir Design]

Hi All,
tks for confirming my suspicions. Steve, appreciate the tips. Will do this time!

I guess the work starts now..

Tgds

TD

[bcire68]

DropBox is a great tip Steve. I've been doing something like that with google docs but DropBox takes it a step further and makes it that much easier.

@TD,
Sorry to hear about that. I had something very similar happen to me when I had a laptop stolen while on a train. I had to recreate my brother's website from scratch with a bit of help from the Ima Guest method. It's not fun but I too learned my lesson and have been uploading a copy of the .xar or .web file along with the website to make sure that I keep a copy of it.

Eric

[gwpriester]

Thumb drives are very inexpensive. I keep a lot of important stuff that I can't afford to lose on an 8GB SanDisk Cruiser. And I keep the SanDisk away from my computer area.

[ckh]

My wife and I use Carbonite for backups. It's $54/year, but, there's unlimited backup per computer. It won't backup a usb or network drive, only drives permanently connected.

We use it in a windows environment, but, it works with a Mac also. Very simple to restore, off site, automatic, well worth the money.

[slavelle]

I typically recommend MozyPro for professionals who want some offsite storage and it's what I recommend to my IT Services clients as well. It only costs about $5/machine plus $.50/gb. So for a 30Gb backup from one computer, it's about $20/month.

If you are a business, it's worth it. How many hours of re-creating that data will you spend? How much is irreplaceable.

It's a little more expensive than Carbonite, but Mozy is backed by EMC, so there's a major player involved. Iron Mountain also has good options, though they tend to be a bit more expensive.

If all else fails, at least have another drive and use something like the sync Toy from MS to sync the files (or Robocopy as I do). I have two data drives in my desktop at the house with my "hobby" stuff on them. I have a script that runs each night and copies the changed files from one to the other and vice versa. It's a little overhead, but both drives contain the full contents of the other, without being a mirror.

No matter what - you NEED to have backups and if you can get at least one copy OFFSITE, even better - whatever method you use.

[steve.ledger]

Just a reminder that this topic is about recreating a website from published files.
We seem to have drifted into recommending backup and commercial offsite storage companies.

[Technoir Design]

It's just not my week....

A friend loaned me a laptop. Not new but enough to get started whilst I do a bit of research re: buying new kit - and I suppose hoping my original laptop might be recovered. Sadly, he forgot to tell me that the battery was way past it's best.. he hadn't used this machine for a while so perhaps he didn't realise.

Anyway, I restarted my work using a dropbox account for online backup. So far, so good.

Yesterday, we had a power failure - pretty common here in Thailand. This meant the machine went onto battery and then auto powered off mid-WD session within (literally) a few minutes and whilst I was away from the machine. So, I missed the opportunity to manually save my work before shutdown.

Result - one corrupted .web file. As as soon as the power came back on and the computer went online, dropbox synchronised the corrupt file with that online. Hence, two corrupt files..

I've just tried Expandxar but don't seem to be having much luck running it on this machine - despite fresh Win 7 x86 etc. Am I supposed to see some sort of GUI with this application or does it simply background process the file and produce results in the runtime folder? 'Dropping' the corrupted file onto it just appears to run something and no sign of results in the runtime folder - not even running as 'admin'.

So, it looks like back to the drawing board again..

So, another couple of 'hard' lessons here too;
1) Make sure you know the full health/state/limitations of your equipment, and
2) be aware that the immediate autosync on dropbox can also drop you in the brown smelly stuff too!

Ho Hum! Now where's that cyanide capsule....

Rgds

TD