Instructions
How to use Umbrella
The Umbrella page itself is needed to support the backup feature, but is not wanted in your web site. To hide it, open the Page Inspector and uncheck the “Show in menu” option. Keep this in mind, as you will have to do it for every Umbrella page you create. If you leave it checked, RapidWeaver will add the Umbrella page to the site menu, which is probably not what you want.
Now you can relax! Try any change you like in your RapidWeaver file. Just remember to take snapshots of the current state by exporting (using any of the export-related commands in RapidWeaver) anytime you reach an interesting situation. Umbrella will do the backup silently in background, into small disk images (the actual size of the image will reflect the backup contents' size).
Should you change your mind and want to go back to a previous version, simply open the backups folder (click the “Open Backups Folder” button in Umbrella) to display them in a Finder window, double-click the disk image to mount it and use the Finder to drag the files you want to recover.
Backups are created when the site is exported or published. You can also create a backup manually at any moment, by clicking the “Do Manual Backup Now” button in Umbrella.
Backup files
Each backup creates a disk image (.dmg) and stores it in the backup folder, located in (home)/Library/Application Support/Umbrella. Open the folder directly by clicking the “Open Backups Folder” button in Umbrella. The files are named with a simple scheme that makes it easy to recover a previous state.For example “MyWebSite-exp-070728-120256.dmg”, where:
- “MyWebSite” is the name of your RapidWeaver document, so you know which backup belongs to which site;
- “exp” is the backup mode (“exp” for export, “pub” for publish, “man” for manual);
- The rest is the date and time of the backup, as YYMMDD-HHMMSS;
- And finally the .dmg extension (backups are made as disk images).
Settings
Umbrella lets you decide how many backups you want to keep for each backup type (i.e. export, publish and manual). After a backup is done, Umbrella automatically deletes the oldest backup of that site for the same type. Note that manual backups (denoted by “man” in their name) are never deleted: if you create a manual backup, you are responsible for moving it out of the backup folder and/or deleting it. Only export and publish backups are deleted automatically when their turn comes as the oldest for that type.You can set the number of backups separately for exports and publishings. This is useful because you will usually create many more exports than you will create publishings. Exports are made on your Mac by RapidWeaver, and they are useful to browse the site while working on it. Publishings are made on your hosting location, thus storing a backup of each publishing is definitely a good idea. As publishings are made less frequently than exports, you may want to keep a larger number of them.
Backups are made in the background by a helper application that is launched and quit automatically. This application has no user interface at all and will fail silently in case of error (such as a problem reading a file or a disk too full). If you find that backups failed to be created, open the Console utility (in /Applications/Utilities) and look for messages sent there by UmbrellaJob. The backup is taken as a low-priority job and will never stop your work in RapidWeaver, even if an error occurs it will happen silently.
You can delete backups manually or move a backup file out of the backups folder. The file will not be found when Umbrella will want to delete it, that's all. UmbrellaJob will send an error message to the Console, absolutely harmless and perfectly safe.
Setting the number of backups must be made taking into account the mode (see below), as for obvious reasons the folder mode may use much more disk space than the simple document mode. If your disk space is tight, avoid backing-up your entire movies archive 250 times, it would probably fail. However, Umbrella will bail out properly and silently, and leave your disk untouched if there is not enough room to do the job.
Folder mode
The “parent folder” mode is much more powerful, as it backups not only the RapidWeaver document but also all you need to build your site: assets, downloadable files, mp3s, etc. However, to avoid filling your disk with useless copies of the same unchanged files, you must organize your workspace properly to use this feature. Fortunately this is quite easy.
In this diagram you can see an example with a typical folder organization optimized for Umbrella. The main site project folder is broken into 2 separate subfolders: the actual source items that you want protected by the backup, and large movies that won't change anytime soon and are too big to be included repetitively in the backups. In this example, only the folder “MySite Source” containing the RapidWeaver document “MySite.rw3” will be backed-up, as well as any subfolders it contains and their files. The folder “MySite Videos” will not be included in the backups, because it is not located into the document's parent folder.
Thus, by breaking the source files into 2 folders, you can easily control what will go into the backup and what will be ignored. In this example, the “Movies” files are used in the site because they are referenced in the RapidWeaver document (as assets or in a movie page) without being actually imported in the document. They will be ignored by Umbrella because they are located outside of the parent folder of “MySite.rw3”.
To avoid unwanted large backups, a confirmation alert appears when you select the “parent folder” mode. The alert can be turned off by checking “Don't show again” in the alert window, and turned back on by holding down the option key while selecting the “parent folder” mode.