Beyond Compare
My last post was about moving sites from one Web hosting provider to another. There’s something I didn’t mention which is very important.
When you copy all the files from the old site, you need to preserve the directory structure, down to the last detail. This includes all the sub-directories of your browser-accessible root directory—usually called public_html, htdocs or wwwroot—and any directories at the same level as this directory, which Web browsers cannot access directly, but your scripts can.
If you are moving to a hosting provider who uses a different system—Linux and Apache, say, instead of Windows and IIS—you may need to change the names of some directories before copying the files to the new site.
All this should be straightforward, if you have a decent FTP client program. There are free FTP clients, and I have used several of them. However, what I use all the time now is a program which I use for all my backups, all my downloads, all my uploads. I have been using it for backups almost since I first came across it, and for FTP work since FTP facilities were added.
The program is called Beyond Compare, and you can download it from the Web site of Scooter Software, who make it. (Its help file used to be called Beyond Help, but they’ve abandoned that particular twee joke.) It’s not free, but it’s not expensive either—and it is quite simply brilliant. It doesn’t just copy and move files. It checks whether files are the same (using criteria which you can control). It comes with file viewers which allow you to see exactly where two files are different—not just text files but binary files, image files, database files, MP3 files…
I should point out that I have no shares in the company which makes it, and I know nothing about them—except that they respond quickly to requests for support. I just think it’s an amazingly useful and versatile program, and I recommend it because I love it.