[Alan Anderson]

The file on the cRIO is an executable program generated from the LabVIEW project. You can retrieve it from the cRIO if you want (using ftp), but you won't be able to do anything with it. It is not in a form that can be edited, and there aren't any tools to turn the executable back into the VIs that were used to create it.

Think of the VIs you edit as the equivalent of eggs and flour and sugar, and the .exe file on the cRIO as a baked cake. If you don't have the ingredients, you can't really use one cake as the raw material to make another one.