Synchronize Your Watches! And Files!

There's a classic scene in many WWII movies where a bunch of guys are trying to coordinate an attack and to create the most surprise and chaos, everything has to happen at once. The tough sergeant pulls his sleeve up, revealing a $2 watch and tells everyone to "synchronize watches!" The typical watch of the era may have gained or lost a minute every day, but the point of the exercise isn't that everyone have the correct time, it's that everyone has the same time. There are times when you want the same thing on your Web site.

I take full advantage of Dreamweaver's .ste files, and create ways into places I'm likely to need to work on from everyplace I'm likely to work. So I have access to my work sites from home and from my laptop and, of course, from work.

But consider this situation: All of the files are the same. The same local files and the same remote files, on all three computers plus the single remote server. I get an idea at home at 9:00 Saturday morning, and change a page at work that said ABC into XYZ. I save this page locally and I put the file onto the remote server so it's live. As far as the world knows, now, the page says 'XYZ'.

At 10:30 that same morning, my wife decides to go to the co-op for a little shopping, and I take that as an opportunity to visit the local coffee house and catch up on my reading. I grab my laptop and head down there. While she's busy looking for organic rutabaga, I've got a head full of caffeine generating wonderful ideas. One of those is to change a page that currently says 123 into one that says 890. I make this change, and save the file locally on my laptop and put it on the server as well.

Eventually, I get to sleep, and rest up the next day while the memory of making these changes recedes into the middle distance. On Monday morning, I come barreling into work with my usual enthusiasm and change a page that had a picture of a kitty into a page that has a photo of a puppy. I save this page locally and upload it to the server as well.

What's my situation now? I have an ABC page on my laptop and my work machine, but I have an XYZ page on my home computer and on the server. I have a 123 page on my home computer, but an 890 page on my laptop and on the server. And I have a kitty at home and on my laptop, but a puppy at work and on my server. If not for synchronization, I'd be starting to wish I'd written some of this down.

Dreamweaver carefully inventories everything in and on your site. It remembers when you have made changes and what those changes are. And during synchronization, it compares what it knows about your local installation with what it sees on the remote server. If Dreamweaver notices a file is newer on the server than on your computer, it makes a note of that and suggests you might want to download the newer, fresher copy. And in the same way, if it notices the file on your computer is newer, it wants to upload that file to the remote server to overwrite the older one that it finds there.

Synchronization uploads or downloads files, depending upon the date-last-modified time stamp. The result is the same information on both a local and a remote computer. If you synchronize often, you will never move more than a few files, and almost always in the same direction, and you'll never confuse your ABC's with your 123's or your puppies.