Why you can’t get your site back from the server
A common question on the RapidWeaver forum is: “I’ve lost my site file on my computer because my hard disk crashed; how can I get my site back from the server and use it in RapidWeaver?”
Short answer: you can’t.
Long answer: your RapidWeaver site file contains all the info used to produce your site; all the settings, the plugin info, the list is massive. It’s what allows you to recreate your site at any time, on any server; it’s why it doesn’t matter if you lose your site on the server, because you have the site file from which you can remake your site as often as you like. What happens when you export or publish your site is that RapidWeaver goes through the whole thing and ‘dumbs everything down’ to a really simple level: HTML and CSS, which are simple languages, far simpler than the much higher-level language RapidWeaver uses to allow you to put your site together. The information that RapidWeaver outputs as your site for upload is probably a thousandth of the original data that your site file itself contains. There’s no way on earth RapidWeaver would be able to use the ‘scraps’ that are on the server to make a new site file. To put it another way, here’s an analogy I used the other day on the forum about the same thing, which went down well: to get RapidWeaver to read what’s on your server and then make a new site file out of would be like feeding a printed sheet of paper into your printer and expecting it to pull it in in reverse and output the whole lot onto your computer screen, complete with all the styles intact. The site on your server has about as much in common with the original RapidWeaver site file as a piece of paper has to do with a word-processing document.
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