Many Mac FTP clients provide a "Translate ISO Characters" option in their preferences menu that is enabled by default. What this option does is force the FTP program to translate special text characters between the Macintosh standard and the ISO 8859-1 character code.

Essentially, this setting filters the files that are being transferred and swaps some of their characters around with other characters.

The problem is, some of these "special text characters" are used as delimiters in our scripts and database and When the Mac FTP programs "translate" them into different characters they actually end up scrambling the data.

The solution is to simply disable "Translate ISO Characters" or any equivalent setting before uploading any files. If you find you need that setting you can turn it back on after but generally it's safe to just leave it disabled.