The Cloud for your working files

Losing his website, a real nightmare! So if you don’t want to lose your data and want to keep it safe, think about the Cloud. All the explanation in the following lines.

The Cloud, a little cloud that wants you well..

The Cloud is a concept that appeared a few years ago and allows online storage of data (photos, music, files, etc.) accessible anywhere and at any time from any computer connected to the Internet. You drop your files on your online storage service and it is automatically synchronized and accessible on all your Mac and Windows computers. Originally intended for businesses, the Cloud is now open to everyone.

Today, nearly 20 online storage services are offered to Internet users. Among the most well-known: Dropbox, Amazon Drive Cloud, Google Drive, etc. With a free basic offer, they can store between 2 to 5 GB of data.

Our advice: even though Dropbox only provides 2 GB of online storage, we preferred this solution for its ease of use. If you wish to increase your storage capacity, there are paid packages available.

Dropbox and WebAcappella

Without talking about collaborative work since WebAcappella is not intended for such a use, it can be interesting to make your online storage account, for example Dropbox, interact with the WebAcappella software to directly deposit your work file. Why?

Let’s imagine for a moment: computer crash, reformatting your hard disk! Result: you lose the data of your site if you have not made a backup! Another case, you are on a business trip and have an important modification to make on your site. You only have your laptop where WebAcappella is installed but you forgot to switch your web project on this computer. Impossible to update your site! Annoying!

By setting up WebAcappella and linking it to your Dropbox account, the updates you make on your site are automatically saved and saved on your Dropbox folder. As soon as you open WebAcappella, you will always have access to the latest version of your site!

How to configure WebAcappella with Dropbox (advanced use)

Create your Dropbox account, install the application on your computer then log in to create a new folder named for example “WebAcappella Projects”. Now open WebAcappella and go to the menu ” Tools ” then ” Options ” on PC or ” Preferences ” on Mac. A dialog box appears. In the ” General ” tab, check ” Change the working folder for your projects ” and select the Dropbox folder you just created. Then click OK.

Note: if you already have projects made in WebAcappella, by default, they are saved on your computer in the folder “Documents” and “WebAcappella_Projects”. After having followed the manipulation explained above and thus changed the location of the working folders in WebAcappella, you will have to close WebAcappella and move the folders containing your site by copy/paste from the folder ” Documents “, ” WebAcappella_4 ” to your new folder in Dropbox. You will then find your site projects the next time you open the software.

Also, do not forget to make this configuration on all the computers where you have installed WebAcappella.

Finally, each time you work on your site (since it will be saved on Dropbox) do not shut down your computer immediately and let your working folder synchronize in Dropbox so that you don’t lose the changes you’ve made. If your working folders are very heavy, the synchronization time will be longer.

In case you want to return to the usual location for your working folders, if this solution did not work, open WebAcappella again. If the software does not find your site, it will ask you to create a new project. Create a new project and give it a name. This project will be empty, you will only use it to change the location of the folders. Go back to the menu ” Tools ” then ” Options ” on PC or ” WebAcapella 4 ” then ” Preferences ” on Mac and uncheck the box ” Change the working folder for your projects ” then close the software. If you have moved your working folders to Dropbox, you will have to put them back by copy/paste in ” Documents ” and ” WebAcappella_Project ” on your hard disk. At the opening of the software, your site projects will be available.

Indispensable backups!

Even if you use Dropbox, we strongly recommend that you continue to make frequent backups of your site, backups to be made according to the pace of updates and changes you make to your site.

To make a backup of your WebAcappella Web site, go to the ” File ” menu then click on ” Save the site in an archive “. Choose the location where you want to put your archive then click on ” Save “. A dialog box will appear to confirm your request and to integrate or not the publication parameters. Click on “Yes”. The backup wizard will confirm the success of the operation.

Once your backup is done, you can store it according to your desires on an external hard disk or even on your Dropbox space in a folder specially designed for your WebAcappella zip archives. Thus, when you want to install the last version of your site on another computer where a WebAcappella license is available, you will just have to open WebAcappella then click on “File” and “Restore a site from an archive”.