This morning I needed to copy a 300 MB file from my dev server to my local machine.  I was lazy and Windows Explorer was already open.  So I called up my ftp:// url and copied the file to my local folder.  It showed 1 hour and some odd minutes to complete.  That’s an amazing 50k per second!  Wow…  broadband has brought us so far. 

2 hours later, the dialog stated 39 minutes remaining.  Hmmm, perhaps that initial prediction was a little fuzzy.  Vista must be applying some fractal logic to determine how long things should take.  Then, KABOOM.  "Windows was unable to copy the file"

Now I remember why I started using FileZilla and why I stopped hating ftp.

So I launched old FileZilla, connected to my same server, and copied the same file.  Now I can see that it, indeed, is achieving around 40k per second.  FileZilla handles communication issues much better.   I failed to time it but I was able to leave the transfer window minimized and continue on with other work.

I still don’t like ftp but no-one has really come up with a great alternative.  Although I am now checking out Drop Box.  Looks promising…

This entry was posted on Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 9:33 am and is filed under Programming, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.