The reason it's doing that is because the default Rakefile
is configured to rm -rf
files inside _deploy
every time you run rake deploy
(Dir["#{deploy_dir}/*"]).each { |f| rm_rf(f) } # line 254
You probably want to comment out that line, and try to deploy again.
Also: .gitignore
that ships with Octopress includes _deploy
by default, so you'll want to remove it from there as well.