Tech: Saving a Website

Subject: Tech: Saving a Website
From: John Hardly
Date: 03 Apr 07 - 11:09 AM

I can't figure out how to save my website (built with Frontpage) to back-up discs.

Subject: RE: Tech: Saving a Website
From: jeffp
Date: 03 Apr 07 - 11:29 AM

Assuming you built it on your local computer and then FTP'd it to the host, you can just copy the folder and its contents to a CD. It should all be contained within one folder.

Subject: RE: Tech: Saving a Website
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 03 Apr 07 - 11:48 AM

That's right.

Subject: RE: Tech: Saving a Website
From: wysiwyg
Date: 03 Apr 07 - 11:53 AM

Doesn't Front Page have a command to do your bidding?

~S~

Subject: RE: Tech: Saving a Website
From: John Hardly
Date: 03 Apr 07 - 12:29 PM

NOTHING listens to my commands. Even the genie that I so fortuitously discovered living in a brass lantern that I bought at an antique store doesn't listen to my commands (anyone need a 12 inch pianist?).

I figured out how to do it. Thanks for the help. I needed to publish it to a folder then copy the folder. I just didn't know that the "publish" command was what I wanted it to do.

Subject: RE: Tech: Saving a Website
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 03 Apr 07 - 07:23 PM

I'd advise you to check that the saved files on the CD do not have truncuated names.

JiK will probably tell you all about why if you ask, but briefly it has to do with naming conventions for files on CDs.

One way around it would be to zip the whole thing - complete with folders names, then save the zip file.

Subject: RE: Tech: Saving a Website
From: wysiwyg
Date: 03 Apr 07 - 07:48 PM

I think you ought to slap that program around a bit more! :~)

~Susan

Subject: RE: Tech: Saving a Website
From: Jim Lad
Date: 03 Apr 07 - 09:03 PM

Click on "File" scroll down and hit "Publish to w... oh! Sorry. You got it then?
Sometimes you forget that you're in "Preview" and the commands won't work for you.
Think I'm in preview myself, half the time.

Subject: RE: Tech: Saving a Website
From: Bert
Date: 04 Apr 07 - 11:32 AM

NEVER save any file in a compressed format. One place I worked did that with all of their files, only to find out, to late, that the latest uncompress programm wouldn't handle the older format.

Subject: RE: Tech: Saving a Website
From: Jim Lad
Date: 04 Apr 07 - 11:53 AM

I'm with you. I'm no techno-geek so the less I do, the less damage I do. I'm not stuck for storage space though.

Subject: RE: Tech: Saving a Website
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 04 Apr 07 - 06:16 PM

"NEVER save any file in a compressed format. One place I worked did that with all of their files, only to find out, to late, that the latest uncompress program wouldn't handle the older format."

Some years ago in the age of small HDs, there were clever things that compressed drives to allow more storage. If anything broke, you could not read the disk if you lost certain parts of the drive - it was all encoded. Clever geeks said "Well sod that for a pair of pyjamas" and went 'commando'.... :-)

Subject: RE: Tech: Saving a Website
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 04 Apr 07 - 11:13 PM

1. Saving from hard drive to CD (or DVD) can result in some filename changes, because the rules are different for the two. A couple of characters that are legal in filenames on your hard drive aren't on a CD, and vice-versa. The big difference is that every "filename" on a CD has to be written as a complete "path+file," and the number of characters that can be included (the length of the name) is only about half as many as can be used on a hard drive.

Both of the CD programs I use, Nero and Roxio, will tell you if they have to change a name, but it's not always easy to figure out whether the change is "acceptable" and especially with Nero (Burning ROM) it can be extremely difficult to figure out exactly which file is being changed, especially if you've got a couple of thousand small files in the burn.

For a simple data backup, you can usually figure out which file you need when you read the stuff back from the CD; but if a file "calls" other files, which is common with html documents, the file can't find a linked file except by its original name, so the links may be demolished when you burn to a CD.

1.a. The suggestion to zip the folder is probably a good one. When file compression was more of a "new thing" there were several competing compression methods, and files compressed with one program might not uncompress with a different program. The methods most used are now sufficiently "standard" that it's seldom a problem finding a program to uncompress with. If you use one of the "complete" zippers, like WinZip, you can make the file "self-extracting" so that the unzip formula is built into the file. Just double-click it and it unzips itself.

The file you get if you make it self-extracting is an .exe rather than a .zip, which seems to confuse some people; but it shouldn't be a problem in your own archive. The self-extracting form also is slightly larger than the raw .zip as well, but the difference isn't usually a problem.

1.b. Another "safety" method one might use relies on the ability of most browsers to "save as" a web archive (.mht) file, in which all of the linked bits are embedded within the file, so the links are "protectd" from any filename changes during the CD burn. Restoring the file to a .htm format if a full recovey is needed would of course require some extra steps if this method is used, but it should make a "safe" - if slightly inconvenient - archive on a CD.

2. The old drive compression programs relied mostly on rewriting so that the entire drive/partition is a single file. Since every file on a hard drive has to start in a new cluster, an average of half a cluster is "wasted" for each file. When disks started getting lots of clusters, and the clusters got "really big" that amounted to lots of waste space. The "compression" program simply made it's own index of where each "file" started within the "compressed partition" so that the whole drive/partition could ignore the cluster breaks. Just as you don't have to have a separate file for each page of a document, with this method you didn't have to have a separate file for each file.

Unfortunately, if the index got lost or corrupted, nothing was readable, and this tended to happen fairly often(?).

A few of these "disk-compression" programs may have applied some additional actual "zip style" compression; but it was the elimination of the "cluster slop" that provided most of the space saving.

3. Not that all this matters much with our new TB sized drives, of course.

John

Subject: RE: Tech: Saving a Website
From: mack/misophist
Date: 05 Apr 07 - 11:37 AM

The method JiK mentioned is called TAR for 'tape archive'. In unix and linux, it is the most common form of compression. Usually a file or folder is tarred and then zipped (called tarballs). I've never had any trouble with one and they're very common so I guess the problemss have been worked out. Of course it never does any harm to double check.