Transfers, activities and logs
Activities
Section titled “Activities”View › Show/Hide Activities opens a panel below the panes. It lists every queued, running and finished job from all windows: copies, moves, deletes, renames, archive jobs, tools, Git commands and uploads.
A running job shows its source and destination, progress, bytes, speed and estimated time left. A finished job shows how many items succeeded, were skipped and failed. Each row has buttons for what’s possible at that moment.
Jobs aren’t kept after you quit.
View › Show/Hide Logs opens the operation log beside Activities. Tool commands and Git output, with exit codes, appear here too.
- Copy All copies the whole log.
- Export… saves it as a text file.
What logs leave out
Section titled “What logs leave out”FileTerm removes common credential shapes from every log line before storing it. Removed values appear as •••. It catches:
- Passwords and tokens in URLs, such as
https://user:token@host. - Authorization headers and
curl -u user:password. - Options and variables with names such as
--password,API_TOKEN=or?token=. - Tokens recognizable on their own, such as GitHub, Slack and AWS key IDs.
This matches patterns, so it can’t promise to catch every secret. A tool’s command or Git’s output could contain anything. Read a log before sharing it.
Hide Personal Paths
Section titled “Hide Personal Paths”Turn on Hide Personal Paths at the top of the Logs panel before you copy or export. It replaces home folders such as /Users/yourname with ~, so the log doesn’t show your user name.
- It applies only to Copy All and Export…. The panel itself still shows full paths.
- It isn’t saved as a setting, so check it each time you share a log.
FileTerm has no crash reporter and writes no log file. Logs stay in memory until you copy or export them, and they’re gone when you quit.
Replace policy
Section titled “Replace policy”Settings › Transfers › Conflicts sets what happens when a file or folder already exists.
- Existing files: Ask, Replace, Replace Older, Keep Both, Skip or Stop.
- Existing folders: Ask, Merge, Replace, Keep Both, Skip or Stop.
The default for both is Ask. See chapter 4 for what each choice does.
Resume and merge policies
Section titled “Resume and merge policies”Merge is covered by the Existing folders policy above.
Pause and Resume work within a session. The transfer continues from where it stopped.
Resuming a partial file after restarting FileTerm or after an interruption isn’t built. The Resume policy control in Settings is grayed out and marked as a future capability. Copies across locations write to a hidden .part file first. Cancel and failure remove it, but a crash can leave one behind.
Upload and download limits
Section titled “Upload and download limits”Settings › Transfers › Bandwidth has separate upload and download limits, in bytes per second. Each is off by default. A limit is shared across all jobs running in that direction.
Copies between local folders aren’t limited. A copy between two servers counts against both limits.
Retry failures
Section titled “Retry failures”- Retry appears on a failed job. It’s grayed out once part of the job has already taken effect, to avoid repeating copies or moves.
- Tools and Git commands are never retried, because rerunning them may not be safe.
- Retrying only the unfinished items of a partly finished job isn’t built.
Settings › Transfers › Reliability can retry temporary failures automatically. This is off by default, with a limit of 5 retries you can change.
Simultaneous transfers
Section titled “Simultaneous transfers”Settings › Transfers › Reliability › Concurrent operations sets how many jobs run at once. The default is 5, and the range is 1 to 64. Copies to the same server run one at a time, and copies to different servers run together.
Queue ordering
Section titled “Queue ordering”Each queued job has Move earlier and Move later buttons. Queued and running jobs have Pause, paused jobs have Resume, and unfinished jobs have Cancel.
Completion check
Section titled “Completion check”Settings › Transfers › Verify copies checks each copy after writing it:
- None: the default.
- File size: compares sizes.
- Checksum: compares file contents using SHA-256, which is slower.
Failure diagnosis
Section titled “Failure diagnosis”When a job fails:
- Read the error in the job’s row in Activities. Some failures also show a hint.
- Open Logs for the full detail of that job.
- If a local folder can’t be opened, the pane offers Open System Settings for the missing permission. A denied copy or move reports its error in Activities and Logs, without that button.
- If a server refuses access, check the account and folder with its administrator.
FileTerm won’t quit while jobs are active. Wait for them, or cancel them in Activities.