How to see what other people just uploaded to your server

Get Recent from Server, in FTP by Zaweba, shows you what changed on the server lately. Pick an age (15 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours, 24 hours or 1 week, or type your own number of minutes, hours or days) and it lists the server files changed in that time, newest first. You can then download them, or simply read the list to see what your colleagues have been up to.

On a site several people work on, that's often the first thing worth doing each morning.

What the list tells you

The list is sorted with the most recent change at the top, so the files someone uploaded a few minutes ago are the first you see. Files that are already identical on your PC are left out, which keeps the list to the things you don't have yet.

Each file has a tick. Only download newer is switched on to begin with, so files where your own copy is newer than the server's start unticked. That protects work you haven't uploaded yet from being replaced.

Fetching the latest changes

Connect to the site and choose Get Recent from Server.

Pick the period. The quick choices cover the usual cases. If you were away for three days, type 3 days instead. Whatever you type is remembered for next time.

Read the list from the top. You'll see which pages, images or scripts have changed. If the aim is only to look, you can stop here.

To bring the changes down, leave the ticks as they are and confirm. If you do want the server's version of a file that's newer on your PC, untick Only download newer. Any local file replaced this way is first kept in local version history, so you can compare or restore it later.

Getting more from it on a shared site

Get Recent tells you what changed, but not who changed it. For that, switch on the shared activity log for the site. Each copy of FTP by Zaweba then adds a line to a log file in the site's root folder after every upload, delete and rename, with the time, the action, the path, the person's chosen name and their PC name. Site > Site Activity shows it with a filter. Everyone should set their name in File > Options for it to read well.

The two work nicely together. The log answers "who touched the contact page?", and Get Recent fetches the result.

Before you start editing, it's worth running Get Recent with a short window. Pulling down the latest copies first means you edit what is actually live, and it cuts the number of conflict warnings later.

How it differs from Get Newer and Sync

Get Newer from Server lists every server file that's newer than your local copy or missing locally, however long ago it changed. It's thorough, and the right tool after a long gap or when you're setting up a new PC.

Sync goes further and can work in both directions, with deletions if you ask for them, and gives a reason for each action.

Get Recent is the narrow one. It's built for the question in the title: what has happened on the server in the last little while? It answers in date order, newest first, which makes a colleague's latest batch easy to spot.

A note on server clocks

The ages in the list depend on the times the server reports. If a host's clock is off, or the server works in a different time zone, files can look older or newer than you expect. FTP by Zaweba explains such gaps when it warns that the server has newer files: a whole number of quarter hours between the two sides usually points to a clock or time-zone difference rather than a real edit.