The answers to 1. and 2. depend on the settings of your particular system, whether you have given a default directory to your FTP client etc. Using command line FTP on Linux and issuing a get
command will download the file to whichever directory you were in when you started ftp
.
Most graphical FTP clients have two panes, one showing your local file system and the other the files on the remote server. Downloading usually means copy from the remote pane to the local one. For example, using gftp
on Linux:
The left hand pane is my local $HOME directory, and the right hand side shows the files found at ftp://ftp.uniprot.org/pub/databases/uniprot. If I click on the left pointing arrow, the selected remote file will be downloaded to /home/terdon
, if I click on the right pointing arrow, the selected local file will be uploaded to /pub/databases/uniprot
.
Using, for example, CuteFTP
on Windows, it is even simpler. The left hand pane is your local file system and you can just drag and drop the remote file to wherever you want it:
As for 3, yes the file is loaded from the server. An smb share is treated as a mounted drive, the OS doesn't care how it was mounted, it sees it and treats it as it would any other drive or folder. So, when you open a file that is on a shared drive, it is loaded directly into memory.