mileslong said:
thanks tag, that will help. one simple and im sure stupid question i have is this. in order to use FTP does someone have to put a specific file to be transferred on a specific server then give you that information on how to access that server? is there a location that has various files that you can download off of?
Well FTP works similarly to HTTP in regards of how to find and retrieve information, though with FTP you get the option(depending on the server) to upload as well (of course you can always do that with PHP in HTTP but anyways...).
When using FTP, you need a server address just as you would if you were browsing the WWW via HTTP. So say you have a friend who's site is 'this-is-mysite.com'. You would connect to 'this-is-mysite.com' with your FTP client and would be able to browse the directories and download files on that server.
Now say your friend sends you an email and says download the '/users/shared/ftp/dailynotes.tar' at 'this-is-mysite.com', you would use your FTP client to connect to 'this-is-mysite.com' and then once logged in you would go directly to /users/shared/ftp, (in Cyberduck you can do this directly by clicking 'Go' in the menubar, then clicking 'Go To Folder', and typing in '/users/shared/ftp'. Then once in that folder, you would download 'dailynotes.tar' from the server (via drag and drop to desktop, or right clicking and downloading).
FTP is nice because you can also explore the system(or what you have access to) and have access to numerous files, as it is called File Transfer Protocol for a reason). Consider FTP like a big sharable, drop box. Who ever owns/administers the server can store whatever they want on the server. They can allow whomever they want to access whatever files they want by placing restrictions(via permissions and user accounts and passwords). If you happen to have access to a specific server and have a privileged user account, you will be able to upload things as well to share with the admin/other users.
Now a bit more technical...
There are a few ways to connect depending on how the FTP server is set up. If you have a privileged username and password for the server and it is a shell system where you have access privileges to read and write files, you most likely will have full access to the ftp server, in order to read, edit, download, and upload any file on the server (to the extent of your access privileges, ie you might be limited to only uploading/downloading files in your home directory and a shared FTP directory).
If you aren't connecting to an FTP server that you have writable/upload privileges to, you might need to still enter a generic username and password, as many private FTP sites are password protected so not every joe in the world can just take whatever they want. So these type of servers you will be able to navigate the file system and download files, but not upload files to share with others.
Alternately if you connect to a server, you might be able to do so anonymously or without needing to login.
(If anonymously your username will be 'anonymous' and your password can be anything, such as your email address or nothing at all, you usually get a message from the server telling you what to use as a password)
If you anonymously connect or connect w/o authentication, you will likely be limited to browsing a shared FTP directory on the server(such as /users/shared/ftp), where you are limited to what you can download, and you will not be able to upload anything.
Ok that was very long winded I apologize, maybe someone will be able to point you to something alot simpler and easier to read.
mileslong said:
my web guy used to add backlinks to my site using FTP somehow and i have no idea what or how he was doing it. i would love to be able to send large files (commercial real estate) which include photos, videos etc but dont have a clue how to go about this. thanks
I have to admit I'm a bit confused on the backlinks thing. I did some reading and backlinks seem to be what sites are linked to yours? I'm not quite sure how you could upload something like that to your site via FTP? Did he maybe create a script and upload it that recorded referrers to a log or something? If you could explain backlinks in context to what you mean maybe I could give it a shot but I'm not sure.
As to sending large files, you can do that via FTP by either having your own FTP server and uploading files to it to share with others, or if someone you want to share them with, (ie a friend or a company), has an FTP server, you could ask them if you could have upload access to it and then you could upload your files to their server so that they can have the files directly.
