Publishing Your Website from the Remote Server
Are you working on your website live? Do you have a backup of your website?
If your answered YES to the first question and NO to the second, you could be in for a nasty surprise one day. Accidents do happen to even the most experienced of computer users. Could you reconstruct all of your hard work if something happened on the server and you had no backup?
If you have FrontPage Server Extensions installed on your host server, you can reverse publish the remote site to your hard drive using FrontPage or Expression Web. First, create an empty website on your hard drive.
Create an Empty Website
Open Expression Web | File | New | Website | General | Empty Website |
Under specify location of the new web | put cursor in box and delete from
the right end up to the slash after My Web Sites \
Type in the name of your
web - use a hyphen rather than a underscore to separate words. I use the actual
name of my website as the folder name.
Click OK
The new web will be created.
Use this for the folder to backup your remote site.
Publish Your Remote Site
Open your site in Expression Web. File | Open Site | Type in the URL of your site. Enter User Name and Password if asked.
With your site open File | Publish Site
Your remote site files will show in the left hand window and will be labeled local site. The right hand side will be blank.
Click remote web site properties
Browse to your newly created web site. If you have not already created a new website on your hard drive, type in the name of your new site. Click OK.
If the folder does not exist, you will be asked if you want to create it. Answer yes and the new web will be created.
Your remote website files will show on the left hand side of the window, the right hand side will be empty BUT the new local web will show at the top of the screen. Tick the Local to Remote button | Publish Web site
Click Publish Web Site and the process will start. All files that are listed including the ones that are used by the host server will be published. Once the process has finished, you will have a copy of your website on your hard drive.