I had all my files for a website stored on a flash drive. For some reason my flash drive is messed up.... So basically, I do not have a copy (or at least not a recent copy) of my site. I need to try to download my files from the remote so that I can have something to work with. What is the best way to go about doing this?? And before anyone tells me.... yes I know now that I need several backups.....

if you have access to the server that you can get it via FTP then just download it with DirectFTP or the Free one?

Yep, that's the best advice; use an FTP client to log into your site and grab the files from there. DirectFTP has a one-button site archive which downloads all the files on your site into a zip file; easy to do and easy to manage once done; what more could you ask for?

Dave.

I do see the archive feature. I think I am not doing something correctly. I guess I should also mention that I use Visual Site Designer. I don't know if that will have any effect on retrieving a working copy of my site or not. When I tried to do all my files at once, the FTP software shut down. I said it experienced an error and had to close. It did that twice. So I tired doing just one file and it did complete that. I tried to do the .vnu file and when I try to open it in the VSD software it says it cannot be read. I think I am missing some piece of this puzzle in my head. I did try to look in the articles knowledge base how something about this, but did not really come up with a step-by-step. Can anyone help me with that? Not only do I need to know how to get the files on to my computer, but I also need to know how to use them once I get them. Believe me when I say - in the future I will have several backups... this sucks!! Thanks for your help.

Melanie i have been having exactly the same problem as you below

"When I tried to do all my files at once, the FTP software shut down. It said it experienced an error and had to close. It did that twice"

I dont know why but when i tried a folder with less content it worked OK

hopefull Scott or someone will have answer just added this so they know its not just you

I haven't had the crash or shutdown issue, but I've had a problem with downloading too many things at once getting all messed up. Been this way since I installed it. I'll try to explain what it does because it's really strange. It's like it re-queues things when it gets stuck on a file and then just keeps re-queuing them over and over. The list of files just goes up and up and up and it don't look like anything is actually finishing in downloading.

Sometimes it's hard to tell by looking at it, but.. I'm 100% sure it's doing something like this because if I stop (have to litterally shut down to stop anything as it don't stop even if I disconnect from the server when this happens) and if I restart it and just do a little bit at a time instead of highlighting 1000's of files, it goes just fine and done without any hitches and quickly. If I let it go when it's stuck it will be like 3 or 4 times as long to download and never finish which is the only way I know it's being stuck because doing a little at a time it finishes really fast.

Hope that made sense, I've been trying to figure out how to explain what it looks like it's doing to me. Just for the record, it has no trouble uploading no matter how many files which is backwards from the other FTP program I used lol, that one had trouble and got stuck on upload, this one gets stuck on download. Since download goes way faster it's much less stressful to deal with if you have to start over LOL.

Hi Jewelcraft & Melanie,
I have XP-SP3 and got an error as well after the "archive" was finished and it closed. What I would suggest is to make a folder and place it in My Documents and download your website files into that folder and zip it for later use. ( backup purposes )

I was able to download the files by selecting just a few at a time. One thing that was strange is that my VSD file is not the most recent. There were actually about 6 VSD files with different time stamps on them all a few months old. I was wondering if it had anything to do with the fact the I usually just upload my changes and not the complete file? I may be grasping at straws here...lol. I just found that odd. Any suggestions?

Melanie you answered your own question
this is why it is said to use the built-in ftp in VSD so the log files and vnu will be updated with every upload.