Re: Good Debian/Linux FTP Client program ???
Randy Patterson wrote:
> On Wednesday 18 April 2007 17:51, Ron Johnson wrote:
>> On 04/18/07 16:29, Randy Patterson wrote:
>> Ah, so what you *really* want is a website synching app, correct?
>
> Well, yes, more or less. I have always used FTP in the past but now that you
> have sort of raise the subject I don't guess I have a requirement for a
> certain protocol so it wouldn't have to be an FTP client! :-) A good FTP
> client makes for a good general purpose tool for doing a number of different
> jobs, website synching would be one of them. I would be open to suggestions
> for an alternative! I think you can teach an old dog new tricks! :-) I have
> already downloaded some of the suggested FTP clients for a test run.
If your server side requirement is not limited to ftp, I would suggest
you investigate rsync [1] and unison-gtk [2]. These are special tools
for *synchronizing* files and directories across networks, while ftp is
focused on simply *transfering* files.
rsync is command line and 'perfect' for synchronizing data from A to B
or vice versa. Instead of you having to look for all the changed files,
the program will look for all files that are different at A and B and
only transfer those parts of files that are different, saving bandwidth.
It is very fast on synchronizing a 200 GB partition of mine to its
backup over the network. At the same time it is more secure than ftp,
since it uses ssh for encrypting the transfer.
unison-gtk is a gui application that will look at both directory trees
and detect and transfer all files that have to be synchronized from A to
B or vice versa. It is extremely fast at finding all the files that
differ on my 40GB laptop partition from those on my workstation and
synchronize all those that were changed on the workstation to the laptop
and vice versa without me having to remember that I edited document A at
the workstation, but document B has the current version on the laptop. I
also use it to synchronize our web pages, so people can connect from
more than one machine and don't have to worry about accidentally
replacing the more recent copy of a file on the server with their older
one from the last synchronisation. ;-)
NB: unison (without gtk) can be used via the command line as well, but
from your previous post, I gathered that you might prefer a gui.
HTH,
Johannes
[1] http://rsync.samba.org/
[2] http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
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