How to move files from one server to another

file-transfer

I have about 600MB on a remote web server that I'd like to copy to a PC, then copy to a new server. I tried FileZilla, but it failed partway through the transfer from the old server and couldn't recover without losing track of what was already finished. Is there a better way?

Thanks for the replies. For clarification, here are more details of the problem and my final results.

Both remote servers are *nix systems with SSH and shell access. I hadn't considered moving the files directly without the intermediate PC; I decided that I wanted to keep it as part of the process, mostly to provide backup for the files. The PC in the middle is Windows, but I have most Linux utilities available as part of Cygwin.

My decision to copy to Windows had an unexpected benefit – it told me of a couple subtle details of my file structure that might have gone unnoticed otherwise. I generated checksums of all the files on both servers and the Windows PC with the following:

find . -type f -exec cksum {} \; | sort >sums.txt

I found a couple of mismatches in the Windows copy. First was two files that had identical names except for upper/lower case differences, which caused the second file to overwrite the first. Second was a soft link, which got converted to a regular file.

I think my initial problems with Filezilla were caused by the upper/lower case duplicate, which caused that file to abort. The server connection was lost by the time I checked back on the transfer status, which explains why I was unable to recover.

Best Answer

Keep using Filezilla.

  1. Rsync of SSH is not better: Filezilla is capable of connecting to a SSH port 22 to tunnel to a FTP service using port 20+21 on that same machine. Filezilla already has the muscle to do this with its queing and SSL capability.

  2. Filezilla has a very mature "resume" capability that should handle ANY connectivity dropout problem when properly configured.

  3. If you want to avoid the unreliable dual port/channel nature of FTPS or FTP (which could be your issue) you could run the "mini" version of CoreFTP server on port 22 on the desination machine and connect to it with WinSCP or CoreFTP client and do the transfer over a single port.

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