Website Nightmare

[Carole]

I have two websites on the go.  
My Astronomy Website
Website for my opera company of which I am the webmaster

My Astro website is hosted via my ISP Virgin media
My Opera Group website is kindly hosted by Mike's ISP and he has recently changed servers.

I use Serif for both websites.
All has been working well up until now.

Mike sent me the new FTP codes and at first I could not get them to work, after a number of "goes" I finally got it to work, only to realise that despite checking which website I was trying to update, on my final "go" I did not check and accidentally uploaded the Opera website to my Astro website domain - DUH!!!!

OK, so I've sorted the opera website, and re-instated the Astro website, but there are lots of files missing.  

So I am going through methodically and replacing the files, which on the whole is working, but my problem is that Serif has stopped letting me save the amendments, it is telling me I don't have enough storage available to complete the operation.

I have 26Gb free space on the C drive
and 498Gb free space on my back up drive and it won't save there either.

Serif will let me add the files and upload to the website, so the website is getting up to date, but as soon as I close Serif the updated files are lost again.  Serif won't support this as it's an older version of their website software which I find utterly appalling since they sold it to me "NEW" by way of a deal to get me to buy something else.  

Any ideas?
I have a feeling it's a gremlin with Serif, as it sometimes would not save in the past, but then later in the day if I leave the file open it will save.  

Carole

[Mike]

26MGb !!!

Wow!!   

That hard drive must be about the same size as my fridge!!!   

[Carole]

26MGb !!!

Wow!!   

That hard drive must be about the same size as my fridge!!!   

Whoops typo, should be 26Gb

Carole

[Mac]

the lack of space is probably not your hard disk, but your space on the web server,
If you have uploaded the opera page to your astronomy page, then the old astronomy stuff would not have been deleted.
its still there, the only page that would have changed would have been your index.htm
as this is the main entry point to 99% of normal web pages.
Unless your pages are called, Page1, Page2 ect.

I would first check that you have free space on your server, and then do as i do.
Assuming that you do actually have enough space to re-upload your web site complete
Move EVERYTHING in to a folder called OLD.
Download the OLD folder (so you will have a copy of everything that was on your website)
Delete the OLD folder so the web host is EMPTY
then re upload your entire website.

If you have files missing then they will be in the old folder and you can re-upload the missing files.

If you have enough space for everything, delete the old folder after you have uploaded the web pages.

Also have a look to see if the web server supports "web disk", as that creates a folder on your hard disk, that links to your web site,
so all you do is drop the new files into that folder, and they are automatically updated on the web.~

Mac.

[Carole]

Thanks Mac,

So are you saying that by uploading the opera website to the same space it didn't overwrite it then?  Or did you think I had just uploaded one page Mac, I had done a full upload of the entire Opera website.  

I was wondering about Server space but I seem to recall it was quite big.  I just checked and I am allowed 200Mb of space.  My Astro site is 42.5 Mb and the Opera Website is 2.55Mb, so even together there is still plenty of space.

Interestingly I have been having further problems with the software since I posted the original post, and it shut itself down.  The original WPP file has completely disappeared both from Serif open file view and on Explore, thank goodness I had a copy on my backup drive, which means as it was slightly out of date, I have to start all over again updating, and this allowed me to save back in the original serif folder, so I am wondering whether the original astro Serif file had become corrupt with all the activity going on.  

Lots of work having to re-do it all again - twice.  Hopefully I have found the problem.

Carole

[MarkS]

Have you been accidently loading all those MegaGigabytes up the to OAS Forum instead? 

Is that why the forum response time is so slow?

[Carole]

 

[mickw]

Ha

Carole's fault all along

Admin, FP, ban Carole, it's the only solution 

[Mac]

unless your opera web pages have exactly the same names as your astronomy pages, which i very much doubt, then they would have just been added.
you will probably have some pages that might have the same name like, news, gallery ect, but probably not.

The only page that would have the same name is index.
and even then you might get away with it, if one is htm and one is html.

for example my band web site has the pages.

Code Select Expand

musicparks.htm
musicaldirector.htm
members.htm
royalartillery.htm
musicaldirector3.htm
joiningtheband.htm
contactus.htm
musicaldirector1.htm
festivals2.htm
festivals.htm
futureconcerts.htm
indexmaster.htm
index.htm
ourmusic2.htm
ourmusic.htm
localcharities.htm
about.htm

If i uploaded your opera site over this, then the chances are the only file that would be changed is the index.
All the other files for the opera site would be added as well, it would be a complete mess, but you could get both sites working if you wanted to.
your web pages only reference the pages you have linked them to.

an easy way to explain is if you take a pack of cards strip it into red and black, and have the red cards represent your astro site and the black cards
representing your opera site, they are all separate, if you shuffle them (i.e upload them all to the same page), all the pages are there, but they are now together, none have changed.

Except the index! which is common to every site.


The problem here is which files do you want to keep, thats why i said copy everything into an old folder, download all the files
upload a new copy of the site and then delete the old folder.

this will probably be the quickest way.

Mac.

[Carole]

Thanks Mac, I do name my pages as it's the only way I can find my way around Serif.  So the pages will have been different to the opera pages.

Still struggling with it all, but I think I am down to observatory installation and other hobbies now that need repairing, apart from one weird hyperlink, but I've had enough for today.

Thanks for your help.

Carole

[Carole]

Mick, I haven't had any problems with the Forum, been wondering what every-one has been going on about, so it must be some-one else's fault.


Carole

[Mike]

My Opera Group website is kindly hosted by Mike's ISP....

It's not. It's a hosted server.

[The Thing]

The trouble with packages like Serif's is that the copy of the site it edits is stored in one big 'project' file. If this gets corrupted you have problems. I use Website X5 which does the same thing. I export my sites locally as websites as well as uploading them to the web servers they live on so if needed I can make manual updates.

There is a lot to be said for manual creation of web pages, my astro website has been created by hand in Notepad++ and so I have no worries about any problems, but my Dew Heater Shop is in Website X5 and if it screwed up the project file I would have to recreate it from scratch as there is no way of importing an exported copy. But it's very easy to use software... Always a trade off somewhere.

[Carole]

I'm gradually getting there, but am having some weird hyperlinks to wrong pages, I guess this is the old pages still sitting there.

So looks like I am going to have to do what Mac suggests and make a copy and delete the old file on the server, but where do I delete it?

The way mine works is the website will remain on the webspace even if I have deleted the file as this is what happened when it deleted itself.  I did not have the back up drive where my spare copy was plugged in at the time.

So not quite sure how to delete the file on the server.

Carole

[Mike]

FTP into the server and then just select all files and delete everything.