TAB looks at FTP clients

For anyone involved in the day-to-day running of a website, a good reliable FTP client is vital to getting anything done. But with so many options available for users to choose from, how is a person to decide which client is right for them? Mike over at The Apple Blog provides some assistance in the form of a roundup of the 5 most popular FTP clients for OS X. As many of you would expect, Panic's Transmit came out on top, followed by Interarchy.
Personally, Transmit is my client of choice for most situations. However, every so often I'll come across a picky server which causes Transmit to start acting weird. In those rare instances, Interarchy comes in real handy.
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For anyone involved in the day-to-day running of a website, a good reliable FTP client is vital to getting anything done. But with so many...
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DaveH,
If you are having trouble with a flaky ftp server I suggest grabbing a copy Interarchy and trying this:
Start the download. After one minute (at least ten seconds otherwise
Interarchy will not bother saving it!), close and abort the download.
Now you should have a resume document and it should be happy because
it was aborted cleanly. So double click the resume document (or just
click the Retry button), and check the transcript. The transcript
should show that the file is resumed because the request from
Interarchy will include a byte range, eg "Range: bytes=6156416-", and
the response will indicate a partial file, "HTTP/1.0 206 Partial
Content" and "Content-Range: bytes 6156416-40284415/40284416".
Ok, so now you have a reasonable hope that the server is well behaved
and supports resuming. Now, double click the resume document and
after a while, abort it and duplicate the resume document and save
that away and double click the original one. Keep repeating this
every time the connection slows down, or periodically whenever you
feel appropriate (once every fifteen minutes or an hour for really
long files).
Now if you ever get in to trouble resuming, you've got backup resume
documents at previous points that you have good confidence will work
(barring some of the issues above of course, so still not guarenteed,
but far more likely).
I have Transmit, based on a rec from a friend. I have been trying to D/L a larger file with a flaky host and flaky connection on my end. The connection goes kaput pretty often. Most of the time I can resume. But inevitably, when I am close to done, it restarts and precious GB's are gone. Any thoughts? My skill level is essentially novice. Don't want to spend more $$ should I try the duck instead? Is there a way to force transmit to not delete partially d/l files?
August 10 2006 at 9:52 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Replyfor managing a middle size web site (around 200,000 files) nothing is as reliable and comfortable as gFTP which runs nicely under X.
Transmit gave up too often for me, sorry.
I use firefox fireftp free and works great
August 10 2006 at 7:48 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI use CyberDuck. The latest version is a bit flakey though.
August 10 2006 at 4:21 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyDoes anyone else thing Transmit (and virtually all other FTP clients) will be reduced to second rate fixtures when sFTPdrive releases their Mac OS X client?
here's my attempt at a link: LINK!
You mean to say there are FTP clients other than Transmit? Hogwash.
Transmit is so nice that I actually try to think of things to put on my server just to have an excuse to use it.
I recently have come to fancy command line myself. I have used graphical interfaces for years but when I do a file or two I seem to go to the good ol prompt.
August 09 2006 at 8:21 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyYeah, I use good ole BSD FTP for all my file transfer needs.
August 09 2006 at 6:53 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyTransmit rocks! I FTP all the time and there is nothing more stable and more Mac-like than Transmit. Cyberduck is a fantastic alternative, but not reliable enough for business use.
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