Esotropiart

After many moons just putting up with Dreamweaver's horrible FTPing, I finally decided to look into it. I don't know why I didn't search about it before or generally try a bunch of different settings. It would have saved me grief in the long-run. Oh well.

Basically, Dreamweaver is pretty horrible for FTP transfers. Well, at least it was doing a horrible job for me on my projects while working from home. It had incredible amounts of errors and inconsistent results. I would run the Synchronize feature once and get a list of every single file on my site - meaning that all files supposedly had changed and needed to be transferred. I would cancel the process, run the Synchronize again and get a list of about half my files. Run it again and it would say, "No synchronization necessary". Run it again and go back to a full list of all my files! Horrible. No consistency. And once the queue of files started transferring, it would fail to transfer about every 7th or 10th file - the interval of failure seemed pretty consistently spaced. So after the whole list was finished, I'd still have to synchronize a second or third time to get all the files properly transferred.

Dreamweaver's FTP was so painstaking and unreliable that I eventually started looking for freeware FTP options. I found CoreFTP LE, which is a fantastic program: free, extremely fast and 99.9999999% reliable. I don't remember ever seeing it fail on a file transfer. Unfortunately, however, it does not have a synchronize feature. So I had to remember which files I had changed so they could be transferred to my various working computers. If you are looking for a way to transfer files to and from your design projects and don't want to waste a ton of cash, CoreFTP LE is a good solution. If it had a synchronize feature, I would use it constantly because it is lightning fast compared to Dreamweaver or web folders (using IE - ew - as an FTP drag-and-drop application).

Just this evening I decided to look into the Dreamweaver FTP problem. I did a basic Google search and found a number of decent documents. None of them were overly profound, and the FTP settings within Dreamweaver are pretty limited. However, the search led me to realize I could simply try fooling around with all the options to see if any of them improved the situation. After a couple tries, I found that by switching the FTP method to passive FTP, my woes disappeared. I just completed my first ever reliable one-step Synchronize in Dreamweaver. No failed files, no inaccurate list of changed files, etc. Fantastic!

So let that be a lesson - mostly to myself - but perhaps others can learn. If you are having any sort of question or problem, especially related to computers, and you have internet access, simply search on Google, and you will probably save yourself some trouble. This sounds pretty obvious, I know. And in reality, I normally am the first one to think of searching for an answer on the internet. I have no idea why I waited so long to look for a problem to my FTP struggle. I guess I just assumed Dreamweaver was junk.... because all the other FTP solutions were working fine. Oh well, live and learn.