General Discussions

**houdini987** · 12:06 PM

I think I want to create a new support group:

Webmasters who killed their sites by restoring from backup using FileZilla, Anonymous...

Actually I should have known better - I've seen it happen in the past and for some stupid reason, I chose to ignore my instinct.

I use DNN 4.3.4 and wanted to upgrade to 4.4 - should be easy enough. It's just overwriting a bunch of files on your web host account. But, err on the side of caution--back everything up ahead of time just in case!

So that's just what I did. Hindsight is 20/20 - I should have zipped up all my folders and then just dragged down the zip files to my local drive. But that's not what I did. Instead, I dragged the entire folder contents down in one massive transfer, 10 connections at a time.

What I didn't realize though, was that while I was gulping down my Diet Coke and waiting for the download to finish, FileZilla was quietly screwing me. Something goes terribly wrong when you open multiple concurrent FTP connections using FZ (at least using the version I use).

About 50% of the time, file A will have the contents of file B in it, and B will have C --- OR B will have B - there really is just no telling.

I think you see where this is going. I didn't know what happened.

And so I, feeling confident that I backed my site up properly, proceeded to FTP the upgrade onto my site. Of course FZ proceeded with its trickery and scrambled the upgrade.

Again, not realizing what happened, I suspected I did something wrong and proceeded to restore from backup. And as I'm sure you can now imagine, the scrambler happened again, bringing my 50% scramble rate up to about 75-80%. I was totally and undeniably hosed.

I tried fixing it myself by transferring the files one at a time but by then it was too late. I had crossed the point of no return. Thankfully, the good folks at WH4L were able to restore me from tape backup (for a $30 fee of course, which at that point I was happy to pay), and all was well again.

Am I the only victim? Call me crazy, but shouldn't I have been able to trust the FTP client to keep its files straight? Perhaps I didn't have a setting set right or maybe I'm just stupid - but there really aren't a lot of parameters to deal with in FTP -- ASCII vs. Binary...

Ho hum, just thought I'd share my grief. Never again am I switching on the multiple connections parameter.