Lost All My Site Definitions In DW 2017.0.1

[pliles]

Two days ago all was fine. I was using DW2017 without significant issues.  This morning, zip!  The software came up empty... Not even a "Open Recent"  I have 226 site definitions to to add those back manually is a non starter. 

I fired up DW CS5 and all was well.

I looked at the forum and at least got the suggestion to export all the CS5  .ste files into a new directory but I do not know where the .ste files go in DW 2017.0.1?

Any assistance would be helpful?

[Jon Fritz]

Once the .ste files have been exported from the older version, all you should need to do is open CC2017 and go to...

Site > Manage Sites > Import

...to bring them into the program.

[pliles · Accepted solution]

The Site > Manage Sites > Import came up light grey... i.e. I could not click on it...  I was so frustrated that I quite DW2017 and went back to CS5 for a bit...  When I reopened DW2017, the Site > Manage Sites > Import  finally showed and I was able to import them but I had to "allow access to the chain"  226 times....  Whew, I am glad that is over!  I still do not know what happened?

Thank you!

[Jon Fritz]

Glad to hear you're up and running.

Out of curiosity, are your sites on your local drive, or are they somewhere on a network?

The only time I've heard of DW wiping site definitions is when there's a crash and the actual site files are stored somewhere other than the local machine's drive.

I've never had it happen myself, but I've got back-up .ste files stored on my local hard drive just in case.

[Sue Nolff]

I also just had my site definitions disappear in the same version. Unfortunately, when i downloaded all the newest software with my subscription, it also uninstalled my last versions automatically. Like John, I had over 200 sites in there. How on earth can I retrieve them??????

My dreamweaver froze up on me completely, so I had to force quit it. That's when I lost my site definitions.  I may have a solution as I also have it installed on my laptop at home. If I am lucky, they will still be there when I get home. I don't think I have nearly close to all my over 200 site definitions in my laptop, but hopefully.

I'm really getting tired of dreamweaver freezing up on me. This happens quite a bit. Usually I just wait it out and go to lunch or something, but occasionally i can't do that and I have to force quit. Now this. UGH!!!!!

[Sue Nolff]

Also, your little Actions dropdown isn't working in Safari or Chrome (so far), and I assume there's an edit option under there. I wanted to edit my above response since I referenced John instead of pliles, like i should have.

[Sue Nolff]

Well, I had more site definitions than I thought. I was able to recover 362 of them from my laptop, but I know I lost at least 60-100 of them with the crash, as I only had the sites that I worked on at home on my laptop. Also, i noticed as I was reloading the definitions that once I hit about the 300 mark, things started slowing down considerably and I kept getting the spinning ball. Maybe Dreamweaver isn't robust enough to handle more than 300 site definitions? Could that explain why it crashes on me so often?

[Jon Fritz]

I suppose that could be a reason for it to slow down, that would be an awful lot of sites to constantly update caches for. I guess it wouldn't surprise me if it was the issue.

Something you could try to see if it speeds up any, would be to turn off the site cache option under Site > Manage Sites for each. I had issues in CC2015 with lagging and that helped quite a bit there.

I've never had near that many site definitions in DW at one time myself though.

Once One of the sites I work on isn't actively in development and there's no maintenance contract, I export a .ste file and delete the site definition from DW. There's no reason to have dormant sites taking up resources. If the owner of the site wants changes at some far off date, I just re-import the .ste when needed.

[Sue Nolff]

Unfortunately, I touch on all those sites often enough to need to keep them in my site Definitions. It's 12 years worth of sites and for a long time, they were all static. Until we get all of our customers to upgrade to our CMS, I'm their go to person for changes to their sites. I will use your method for some of them though since I don't hear from some of them often. Thanks for the cache suggestion too. Great ideas!

[Sue Nolff]

There, I knocked it down to about 150 of the most active ones, and I'm going to uncheck the cache box for each of them. I'll come back in a couple weeks and let you know if it's working better, as a reference for others.