Synchronising a Site

Sending a simple file to your site presents no difficulty. But if you substantially update your site, it will be tedious to identify all the files that have been changed. Uploading the whole site would not be a good idea. This could be a time- and bandwidth-consuming process. The solution is called synchronisation.

Synchronisation can be done with Dreamweaver and enables you to send to the remote server only the local files that are more recent than those located on the provider's server. And the selection occurs automatically. To do this, proceed as follows:

1. Select Site > Synchronize in the site management window.
   
   
The Synchronize Files window appears.



Figure 5: The synchronisation window


2. Select in the Synchronize drop-down list, the Entire 'name' Site option, then Put newer files to remote in the Direction list.
   
   
3. Click on Preview to validate these choices.
   
   
Dreamweaver takes the time to examine your remote site to determine the files that need to be updated. Once this operation is complete, another dialog box appears with a list of the files selected for uploading.



Figure 6: List of files to be sent to the remote server


4. If certain files do not need to be sent, tick off their respective Put checkboxes.
   
   
5. Click on OK to validate your choice and to begin the file transfer.
   
   
This operation may take a certain amount of time, depending on the number of files to be updated.

Once the uploading process is complete, the site is totally updated. All changes made in your local site after the previous transfer are now applied to the remote site and are visible on the web.