Synchronizing the Local and Remote Sites

Having two copies of a Web siteone on your local machine and the other on a Web servercan potentially lead to trouble. It's possible, for example, for you to update several pages on your local site, and lose track of just which files you changed. In that case, it might be difficult for you to determine which copy of the site (local or remote) has the latest version of the files. Dreamweaver's Synchronize command compares the local and remote sites and transfers the newer files in either direction.

To synchronize local and remote sites:

1.	Right-click in the Files panel. From the shortcut menu that appears, choose Synchronize. or Choose Site > Synchronize Sitewide. The Synchronize Files dialog appears ( Figure 2.21 ). Figure 2.21. In the Synchronize Files dialog, you'll need to select the synchronization method you want to use.
2.	From the Synchronize pop-up menu, choose the files you want to update. Your choices are to synchronize all the files in the site, or just files or folders that you selected in the Local view.
3.	From the Direction pop-up menu, choose how you would like to copy newer files: Put newer files to remote sends newer files from your local site folder to the Web server. Get newer files from remote finds newer files on the Web server, and copies them to your local site folder. This option will also copy completely new files that are on the Web server (ones, for example, that may have been placed there by a coworker) to your local site folder. Get and Put newer files synchronizes files both ways. New files on the local site will be transferred to the remote site and vice versa.
4.	(Optional) If you want, turn on the "Delete remote files not on local drive" check box. This is a good option to choose when you've made substantial deletions in the local site (perhaps because you did a big site cleanup). The wording of this option changes depending on what you chose in step 3. If you chose to transfer newer files from the remote site, the wording changes to "Delete local files not on remote server." If you chose to get and put files, this option becomes inactive.
5.	Click Preview. Dreamweaver connects to the remote site, and compares the files you chose to synchronize, then displays the Synchronize dialog ( Figure 2.22 ). This allows you to preview the changes that will be made on the site. The Action column in the dialog tells you what Dreamweaver proposes to do to each file. Figure 2.22. You can select actions in the Synchronize dialog that will affect the files as they are synchronized.
6.	If desired, select one or more files in the Synchronize dialog and choose one of the action buttons at the bottom of the dialog. You have the following choices: Get marks the selected files to be retrieved from the remote site. Put marks the selected files to be sent to the remote site. Delete marks the selected files for deletion. Ignore tells Dreamweaver to ignore the selected files for this synchronization. Mark as synchronized tells Dreamweaver to consider the selected files as already synchronized, so no action will be taken. Compare opens the local and remote versions of the file so you can compare their differences.
7.	Click OK. Dreamweaver performs the synchronization.