Many of you will know – web design is a complicated process, where you will often acquire a variety of passwords, logins, database names, and so on.
Often-times you will find yourself needing to log in to your FTP using another client (for example – Filezilla, my FTP client of choice!), only to discover that you have misplaced your FTP details.
Well, not to worry, if you use Dreamweaver’s “Site” functionality (there will be a video blog on this soon), then you can easily recover your FTP password.
Export the STE
Export the STE – it sounds strange, but it works. All you need to do is open Dreamweaver and click Site -> Manage Sites…
This will open a list of all your Dreamweaver sites (again, if you don’t use the Dreamweaver “Site” functionality, then this is a waste of time!), click on the site in question so that it is highlighted and then click Export…
Select the “Back up my settings (includes login, password and local paths)” check box. Click OK then chose the destination for your STE file; perhaps just onto the desktop for now. Click Save then Done.
Open the STE
Now that you have exported your STE file, you will need to open in in a text based program (Mac – TextEdit, PC – Notepad).
This file may look confusing at first, but it is literally just all the stored information for your Dreamweaver site. Find the line that starts with <remoteinfo, approximately 6 lines down.
Further along in this line you will find pw=” and then a variety of numbers; this is your encrypted password. This won’t work in another FTP program, but it is easy enough to convert to a decrypted password.
Decrypt your Dreamweaver FTP Password
All you need to do to decrypt your Dreamweaver Site password, is go to the following website: AppTools -Dreamweaver Password Recovery
Scroll down to the bottom and enter your encrypted password (the variety of numbers and letters found in the STE file), click Get Password and on the next page you will find the actual password to you FTP!
Conclusion
All you’d need to do now is use the other information from the STE file, and your newly decrypted password.
I hope this helps some of you out; how do you guys keep your passwords and web design information safe?
