what happenes when a file transfer is in progress and it gets cut off , while overwriting another file. will it be messed up or will it revert to the original?
also, how can a program tell exactly where to resume a file transfer? how does that work?
I assume that we are talking about ftp.
If you are overwriting a file and the transfer aborts, you get a file which is the beginning of the new followed by the ending of the old. This is probably a useless mess.
The reget (re-get) operation assumes that you were not overwriting the file. It looks at the file on your local disk and that it is x bytes long. It then request the server to send the file starting at byte x+1.
Perderabo assumed you were referring to FTP, so I’ll assume that you were referring to HTTP.
If you’re using Internet Explorer, your HTTP downloads are to a special “temporary files” directory, then the file is copied over to the directory that you assigned as a final step. If a download is aborted during the download process, any copy of the file that was originally in your destination directory will stil be there.
Since Golf and Perderabo gave you answered that pertain to FTP and HTTP, I’ll assume you meant a file copy in the Finder, i.e., from one drive to another, with the source drive being on another computer somewhere on your network.
The original file will have been discarded by the copy operation; the source file will not normally appear at all since the copy operation did not complete, and the last “act” of the copy operation is to update the table of files and their names and locations; so although you have some supply of bits of the source file, your OS does not perceive it as a file.
So you have to try again or do without any copy of the file.