Automated backup through FTP?

Hi,

Before I set up WinAT and wget to automate the backing up of our web site every day from our hoster to a PC here... do you know of a good and free utility that would do this?

Should run on W2K, preferably run as a service, be recursive, and only download files that have changed (using a smarter way than just checking date/time on the FTP server since the two hosts are not synced)?

Thx

Frederic Faure
Friday, December 5, 2003

This might be what you're looking for.  I've been using it for a couple months, and it seems to work ok.

http://www.angrycoder.com/article.aspx?cid=5&y=2003&m=10&d=1

nathan
Friday, December 5, 2003

Thanks, but it looks like a .Net program, but we don't have those here yet (and I'd rather avoid installing the framework to avoid breaking anything.)

Frederic Faure
Friday, December 5, 2003

Whats wrong with rync?

El Macho
Friday, December 5, 2003

ugh, it's rsync

El Macho
Friday, December 5, 2003

What OS is the hosting machine, what services are you able to run on it and what protocols will the hoster allow ?

Rsync is the classic best solution - you can set the server as a service under win2k but it's a bit fiddly getting the correct cygwin.dll versions and it didn't support ssh last time I tried.

If you only need daily backups not a live mirror a simple solution is a script on the server which makes a zip file of all chnaged files every day. The once a day you can email/ftp that to your backup machine.

Martin Beckett
Friday, December 5, 2003

Nothing wrong with rsync, except the FTP/WWW server is hosted, ie. I can install rsync :-)

>> What OS is the hosting machine, what services are you able to run on it and what protocols will the hoster allow ?

The server is running Linux, and I can only use FTP to upload/download stuff.

>> If you only need daily backups not a live mirror a simple solution is a script on the server which makes a zip file of all chnaged files every day. The once a day you can email/ftp that to your backup machine.

I was looking for a utility so I wouldn't have to bother doing this myself (write a utility that parses a whole directory tree on an FTP server and download only those files that changed, install WinAT, set it up to launch the utility every other hour). I guess it's going to be WinAT + wget :-)

Thx anyway

Frederic Faure
Friday, December 5, 2003

Check out Handy Backup.

http://www.handybackup.com

Jonathan A.
Friday, December 5, 2003

Opps.  Looks like you were looking for something to download the files from your the FTP server and not backup your machine to FTP.

Sorry about that.

Jonathan A.
Friday, December 5, 2003

No prob. Thx anyway :-)

WinAT + wget -mr ftp://joe:pass@acme.com to go

Frederic Faure
Friday, December 5, 2003

There's a script that comes with the python language called mirror that can do it.

Tom Vu
Saturday, December 6, 2003

I did this with a shell script on the server and an ANT script on a workstation.  The server shell script zips up a bunch of files (and database dumps) every night.  About an hour later, the workstation does an automatic FTP and then backs it up on tape.

It's not really what ant is intended to do (it's a build tool after all), but ant can FTP files, create and delete directories, copy files, and zip/unzip.  What more is needed?

Will
Wednesday, December 10, 2003

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