You have local installation of drupal 7. Suppose its 'http://tms.devs' and its live suppose 'www.example.com'. Now you have the database of live site and also the latest files except the image files. Now you don't want to download all the images from server. to keep your local development environment light. So you can access the files from the live server using .htaccess file. To access the files Form server write the following codes to your root .htaccess file: RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/sites/default/files/(.*)$ RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [L,QSA]
Some of my Working process. +