Backup of former Installation - CHMOD Issues

[jsw_nz]

Hi,

I wanted to ask this question of those who are more familiar with chmod issues than I am. I am backing up an RC1.1 installation and doing a brand new clean install of DEV 1.2.6, and then upload a brand new site design, that I have developed locally.

Here is my question.

Basically (as part of my backup strategy) I want to download all files to my hard drive, and most everything downloads successfully. The only problem are certain files in the phpwcms filestorage directory. I can neither download these, or perform a chmod on them. this is not the first time I have encountered this. So apart from contacting the hosting provider to change these settings so that I can download, not sure what else is avaiable.

Here is some background and two questions.

phpwcms_filestorge directory and subdirectories are set to 777, no problems there.

yet the actual image files (images, mpg, etc), that are written by wcms are implicitly set to 600: User: Read-Write. Wcms sets this by default

Using my standard ftp program (core ftp lite) - I am unable to chmod these to 644, 666 or 777 or any other setting for that matter. so my questions are 2

(1) why this is so - is this a hosting service issue -
(2) are there any workarounds - allowing me to download the individual files inside the phpwcms_filestorage directory

Have encountered this more than once so wanted to ask those that are familiar with this issue.

Thanks for any advice

[DeXXus]

so my questions are 2

(1) why this is so - is this a hosting service issue -

Yep !
http://www.phpwcms.de/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9768

By default, webservers are often set up to run processes (in this context) as the user -nobody- and as a precaution, has very limited or restrictive privileges on the overall system. Sometimes, when the webserver runs a script that does not have filesystem handling (for a specific chmod setting) it ~may~ be configured to create the file(s) on your system with a preset (ex. chmod 600) level and becomes the owner of that file. When you ftp -or- ssh to your machine, you log in as your -username- and since the user -nobody- actually owns the file(s), your -username- cannot change those properties.

(2) are there any workarounds - allowing me to download the individual files inside the phpwcms_filestorage directory

If you do not have shell access -or- if your user account (for FTP client) does not have sufficient privileges... you might have to get host to chmod -R xxx phpwcms_filestorage for you.