How do I save pages to my harddisk?

[TacoV]

Hello everyone,

I'm part of a youth council and someone has made a website for us, but for him to keep updating our site is too much work for him so he gave me the username and password to log on to cPanel. He made the site with Dreamweaver (wich I already have on my computer), so if I want to change the site I need to have the pages on my harddisk, so my question is: how do I save the pages from cPanel to my harddisk?

I'm sorry if this question has been answered before, I used the search but couldn't find anything.

Thanks

[Otrell]

Hi TacoV,

You can use File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to download your website files to your hard disk.

If you are not very familiar with a program like WSFTP, CuteFTP, or SmartFTP, then it may be easiest to just use Internet Explorer.

Just open a new Internet Explorer window, and in the address bar type in "ftp.PUTDOMAINHERE.com", substitute PUTDOMAINHERE with your actual website domain, a window will pop up asking you for your username and password, you will use the same username and password you use to log into Cpanel.

Now you want to make sure that you browse to the folder "public_html", do not concern yourself with any of the other folders at this time, and changing their contents could result in real problems for the account! So after clicking on public_html, all the files inside there are your website files. you can do a Select All or Control + A, right click on a highlighted file to bring down the properties menu, and select copy. Then paste (save) them either to your desktop in a folder, or to wherever you want to work on them on your hard disk. When you modify a file, save it locally first, and then either copy and paste it into the IE window with the FTP session open, or you can actually "Drag and Drop" the file right in that window as well. It will ask if you want to overwrite the file, since you want to in essence, delete the old file, and replace it with the new file that has your changes in it, select yes.

Please note, once you replace or delete a file -- it is gone -- and unless you have a backup stored locally or on the server, there is no getting it back.

There is also the option of learning how to utilize Dreamweaver's capability to connecting directly to the server just like the FTP programs do it. If you go through the help documentation available within that program, I believe you will find it rather straight forward.

My personal suggestion would be, if you plan on doing this on a consistent basis, you learn the ins and outs of a FTP program like Smart FTP, a free trial version is available at http://www.smartftp.com/download/. The software is well documented, and not very resource intensive.

Hope this helps...

[TacoV]

Allright, thanks man, I'll try it first thing when I get home this afternoon

[TacoV]

It worked like a charm and the site has had it's first update in months, thanks alot for the help Otrell

[Otrell]

No problem. I am glad I could be of help. Best of luck with future updates.