I started an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription today, and it being Sunday, I had chattering kids and a grumbling husband distracting me all day. So, when I decided to uninstall all my Adobe CS4 programs all at once, I didn’t think things through. Oh sure, I saved my Photoshop brushes to a different place, but what about Dreamweaver site definitions? Oh. Nope. Totally forgot about them. There’s something about saving the login details for all your websites once and then forgetting about them entirely that makes Dreamweaver so convenient…
Anyhow, I uninstalled my DW CS4. How can I get those site definitions back? I looked in my restore file…no site definitions to be found. After some research, I found that the site definitions are in the registry (this is for Windows).
The directions? Open up your Start menu, type in regedit into the search and then press enter. Once you’re in the registry, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > Adobe > Common > 10 and then right-click on Sites to create an export. Name it and put it into a location you’ll remember.
Open up the file in Notepad and change all the “Common\10” strings to “Common\12.0”; this will save the definitions to work with DW CS6. Import the registry file into HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > Adobe > Common > 12.0.
So I did these things. And I opened up Dreamweaver. No sites to be found. I created a test site and found that in the -Summary file (just under the Sites directory), there’s something called “Number of Sites”. While my number of sites in the 12.0 directory just said 1 in parentheses, the -Summary file in the 10 directory had 29. I did a few things to try to get the values to match, and I think the correct way to do this is to input the number from the 10 directory (I had 29 so I put in 29) and choose “decimal” instead of “hexadecimal” (the hexadecimal changed the 29 to 41).
The last line of your -Summary file should look like this:
Number of Sites | REG_DWORD | 0x0000001d(the # of site definitions you have)
Open up Dreamweaver and see all of your site definitions restored!
