Great Moments by Design - Transmit
Most users are aware of how important it is to back up your stuff. The same goes for running a website. For this site, I use a plugin that emails me a copy of the Wordpress database once a day. In addition, I back up the actual files of the Wordpress directory once a week to my local machine.
On my local machine I have two directories for The Weekly Review. One is for development – trying out new things before making the change on the site itself – and lives in my MAMP directory. The second folder is where I keep the backup files as mentioned above.
Backing up those files is the focus of todays Great Moments by Design. Ever since I moved to using a Mac at home, Transmit by Panic has been my FTP application of choice. It has a ton of great features, many of which I don’t even use. But there is one that really makes it an essential tool for me. Syncing: this feature (more like a feature set) makes it really easy to add new items or make style changes on my development folder locally and then sync those changes to my live site.
My workflow is usually as follows:
- Test change in local development setup
- Copy files affected by any changes to my backup folder
- Sync backup folder with my theme folder on host server
So that’s the normal workflow. But sometimes I need files to be updated in the other direction. That’s when the sync functionality is really great. As seen in the screenshot below, Panic has incorporated enough options that make the sync work for almost any scenario you might encounter.
You can choose upload or download depending where the changes need to be made. As well, you can update (only copy modified files) or mirror (make exact update). Whatever your need, Transmit can get it done.
Syncing makes Transmit an essential application for me and earns it a spot in my dock.
