Create a copy of the contents of your webhotel on your own computer by using FrontPage
FrontPage will allow that you work with the files on the web server, as if they where on your local computer – this makes it easy to keep the website up to date when you edit the files, since all changes made are stored directly on the web server and is therefore live immediately.
It can however become a problem if it is desired to experiment a little, since it is not a good idea to experiment on a live website. Therefore it would be a better option to have a local copy of the website on your computer – and also have a backup copy somewhere on your own hard drive - backups have never harmed anybody.
Experiences show that it is not possible to download the entire website with a FTP program (well you can, but links and references in the pages will cause too many problems), and it can be an overwhelmingly large task to open each file in FrontPage and save them on the hard drive.
The solution is to open the website on the web server and publicise it to the local hard drive – that is the opposite of the normal procedures. This is done in the following manner:
- Open the website in FrontPage as you would normally by "http://(your domain name)"
- Delete old files that are no longer used – since there is no reason to copy them to your hard drive when they are no longer in use.
- Choose "Files" -> "Publicise website". Choose a new empty folder on your local machine, for instance C:\web\(your domain name)
- FrontPage will now ask whether or not it can create the necessary sub folders and files – say yes to this. There will also come a message that certain files will only work as expected when they are on the a server with FrontPage Extensions installed – this is normal, so just click "OK". FrontPage will now copy the entire website to the folder on your local computer. Notice that this can take a rather long time depending on your internet connection and the size of the website.
- When the copy process has finished close the connection to the website, either choose "Files" -> "Close website" or by restarting FrontPage.
- Now start FrontPage or choose "Open website". Now open "C:\web\(your domain name)" instead of "http://(your domain name)" and you can now work on the local version of your files.