Use Dreamweaver? Then Make Sure You Have MM-Exporter

If you use Macromedia Dreamweaver, you may have had the experience of having your installation suddenly have an error which required you to uninstall and reinstall the program...the dreaded "Dreamweaver has encountered a fatal exception and will now close" error.

Okay, not so hard, these things happen from time to time. Such is life with computers. Reinstall the program.

But what about all your Site Definitions? That's right, they're gone, too. And sometimes you won't even notice any discernable problem with Dreamweaver, it will start up just fine and everything will seem normal, until you go to open a defined site and there is nothing there. All of your site definitions have inexplicably disappeared. Every web site, every FTP definition, every username, every password (of course, you have all of those backed up in a handy, safe place, right?), every Extension you've installed with the Extension Manager, every unique configuration move you've made to your installation has to be redone...yikes!

It's almost as bad as a hard drive crash with your data being unrecoverable (well, not quite, but if you're a webmaster with a lot of sites defined in there, it can be a real hassle).

I know, it's happened to me four times in the last six years. Well, actually six times, but the last two I didn't even care about. Wasn't the least bit concerned.

Why not?

Because of a super-handy, little freeware(?) program called MM-Exporter (MM for "Macromedia"), a backup utility to save and restore all your important settings and data from not only Macromedia® Dreamweaver®, but also Contribute®, Fireworks®, and Flash®. The program was authored by Jörg Schmalenberger, an Adobe Community Expert, and Team Macromedia member since 2001.

Here's how MM-Exporter works:

You download and install the program. You launch the program and "export" the settings and back up the configuration of the Macromedia product of your choice. If -- scratch that -- when -- you have one of the aforementioned problems, you launch the program and "import" all of those settings right back in, along with restoring your configuration settings. Viola! [see Screenshots]

The only drawbacks?
1) It's doesn't have an automatic backup feature; you still have to backup manually, and it's best that you do so every time you make a significant change to the configuration settings or define a new site.
2) There is no Macintosh version.

But for the peace of mind and incredible time savings it offers, MM-Exporter should be part of every Macromedia nut's toolbox.

Get MM-Exporter at http://mm-exporter.joexx.de/
The current version is 2.3.3
You can be kept up-to-date by e-mail when a new version is released by registering with the MM-Exporter Forum.