With the upcoming closure of the iWeb hosting by Apple, I’ve been looking around for at different hosting options.
However, in the midst of this, I discovered that during the various machine upgrades, swaps and so on, I had somehow misplaced the iWeb data files stored in ~/Library/Application Support. Since I only use iWeb for a little personal blog for friends and family and it gets updated very intermittently, I had not noticed that the files had gone AWOL.
My initial thought was to scrape the existing site to get a local copy that I could add to a fresh site, but iWeb sites use quite a bit of javascript, making it awfully difficult to scrape.
I discovered that iWeb sites are actually stored under the Web/Sites directory on iDisk. So if you need a copy of your existing site, you need only mount your iDisk (Go > iDisk > My iDisk) and copy the site folder to your local disk.
You can’t import these files into iWeb, but at least it offers the possibility of presenting a snapshot of the site if you want to post a copy of its last known state. A nice touch of the sites produced by iWeb is that they are completely autonomous and can be hosted on practically any web server or hosting service, so you can drop your old site into a folder and link to that.