AutoHotkey Community

While trying to find out how to synchronize a remote FTP site with a local folder, I found the following utilities rsync, richcopy, deltacopy, FTPsync, ftpdrive. I thought it might be worth posting their links here.

I need something to run on my business server so the only source I know I can trust is Richcopy (Microsoft), but so far I haven't been able to make it work with any FTP sites. Does anyone by any chance have any experience in using RichCopy to synchronize via FTP?

If you could get ssh set up on your server you could use one of the sftp programs such as putty sftp of filezilla

These would be more secure for your business as passwords get sent in plain text with ftp but are encrypted with sftp.

I'm sure it wouldn't be too much effort to create an ahk script which monitors a folder on your computer and syncronises it with your server, a la Dropbox, or simply runs a specified command every half hour or so to keep your two machines syncronised. (As both psftp and fzsftp run from the command line you could have them run in the background)

wooly_sammoth: Thanks for your reply, but the remote FTP site isn't my own. I believe it's a windows machine and I have no experience using SSH. I've been using the FileZilla client for many years to download/upload to FTP sites. When you say they can both be run from the command line, you pretty much just mean they can be started/stopped from the command line as described here:
http://wiki.filezilla-project.org/Comma ... ts_(Client)

Or did you mean they can be "automated" through the command line to upload/download specific files for examples?

Not 100% sure about the Filezilla option but putty sftp is just a command line executable. I haven't used it for anything other than uploading and downloading but I'm sure that with other arguments it could be made to download all but skip any files which already exist on the target machine for example. you could create an autohotkey app that could automate the command for you.

Just re-read your post and realised that you are talking about just filezilla ftp not sftp in which case I'm even less sure. I have used standalone fzsftp.exe on the command line but not the full ftp client.

Have you considered setting up your own remote server? A simple virtual server just running ssh could act as your backup. It would be more secure in transit and you'd be in control of the data rather than relying on another companys server

I'll have to look into this!

We both seem to be confusing fzsftp/FileZilla, I thought you were refering to the standard FileZilla FTP client, but you mean to say that fzsftp can be used as a standalone FTP utility? I've tried finding out how to use fzsftp, but all I found was http://man.cx/fzsftp(1 which isn't very informative at all. When I run fzsftp, it gives me an error message saying that it can only be run from FileZilla, do I need to have FileZilla running? If not, where can I find more information on how to use fzsftp?

Unfortunately, this is a collaboration project between two different companies who intend to share project files over FTP so that's not really a viable option.

fzsftp is the sftp module for the filezilla client. It is bundled with the client when you download it. I'm not sure (and your searches seem to back this up) that you could download it seperately. I have used it as a command line utility though but I had Filezilla installed at the time.

I had a quick look at http://man.cx/fzsftp and noticed this line



so it seems that by using one you are using the other anyway