Ftp – Can anyone recommend a free FTP client for Linux that allows scheduled transfers

ftp

This was originally posted at Stack Overflow; someone there suggested I post it here.

I'm looking to do nightly backups – copy files from a dev server to my local machine. I'm on Ubuntu Lucid, and currently use FileZilla for FTP, but it doesn't support scheduled transfers and based on their discussion forums, it never will.

Can anyone recommend a free, GUI ftp client that supports scheduled transfers and runs on Linux? I'd prefer not to have to use cron jobs for something that should be simple just because I'm running Linux.

Best Answer

Cron is not hard to learn at all. First write a shell script to perform the ftp, or simply make the ftp command call and get that working. Next setup the cron job to run. 

*     *     *   *    *        command to be executed
-     -     -   -    -
|     |     |   |    |
|     |     |   |    +----- day of week (0 - 6) (Sunday=0)
|     |     |   +------- month (1 - 12)
|     |     +--------- day of        month (1 - 31)
|     +----------- hour (0 - 23)
+------------- min (0 - 59)

There are plenty of cron references and tight deadline or not this is trivial to learn.

Another alternative, though this will take some time to learn and configure is rsync. We use this at work to backup web servers and sql databases. We have a backup server with public key pairs setup on all our web servers, and each night we have a cron execute which ssh's to the web servers, runs a few commands, packages up the backup and runs rsync to push back.

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