Why I hate OSX.
My hard drive crashed on Wednesday so I've been without my Dell laptop for a couple of days now. I have a Mac mini that I use to test my webpages in Safari so I've been using it (sparingly) while I wait on my new hard drive to arrive.
Normally my interaction with OSX is limited to starting Safari , testing my page, and closing Safari. I'll admit that my experience with OSX is quite limited. For this reason I've never been that critical of the software. However, my recent catastrophe has led me to really dislike using it.
If you are seeing that error before you were prompted for a username and password, you likely entered the server address incorrectly. Check that first.
If you still can't get it to work, OS X (note the space, please) has your standard CLI-based FTP client… if you're not afraid of the command line, fire up Terminal (in Applications/Utilities) and give it a go. It also has rsync.
My personal favorite Mac FTP client is Transmit, though it's shareware. http://www.panic.com/transmit/
I'm not afraid of the command-line but it's no longer "easy" There are always multiple ways to accomplish the same task and in the end I did get the files transferred.
There have been several times while working on a Mac that I run into a situation like this.
I'm a coder. I understand bugs, but simply saying "Oops! It didn't work." is not enough.
It doesn't always work and I need some information to help me fix it.
My complaint is really with the lack of information.