FTP Schedule

File Transfer Protocol offers a convenient way of sharing files from one location to another without worrying about unauthorized data access. Because every session is encrypted, you can be confident that your data is secured even during the process of transferring files.

Small and large scale businesses in different industries can benefit from an online FTP service.  Aside from giving different people permission to access your files, you can also schedule file back ups through a reliable and fast FTP service. One of the many things people tend to forget is to regularly back up their files. With a scheduler, you simply have to choose how often you want to back up your files, which folders you want to back up and what time of the day you want to do the process.

Businesses with virtual offices should have an online file management service they can rely on. This means choosing a service that has zero downtime, a friendly UI and RAID configured storage mediums. You need to look for a service that has an easy-to-understand interface to make sure all users who need to access your files will be able to do so even if they don't have knowledge about the different FTP command lines.

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Automatic FTP upload is part of the standard features of an online data management service. This means that transfer and sharing files becomes easier since you can schedule all your tasks. With this feature, you won't have to worry about forgetting to update files and folders, which improves business efficiency. Aside from this feature, online storage services also allow anyone with permission to access, edit, update, download and upload files in your account.

The beauty of online file storage service is that you can stop worrying about losing important data due to hard drive problems like head crash, virus infections or faulty controller electronics. As long as a user has access to the Internet - retrieval, storage, and sharing of files are possible. Manufacturing and health care industries all around the world are vastly shifting to this technology because of the risks involved in losing confidential and important information. Features such as file transfer, multiple access to files and automatic file upload over a secure system take the worries away of many businesses.

Are you ready to give SmartFile a try? You don't have to sign up for a contract immediately. You can try our services for free for 14 days so you have time evaluate our features and see how we can help your business.

It’s very important to choose the best File Transfer Protocol software for managing your company’s files. This is even more critical if you are doing business online since your FTP server is responsible for storing and managing all your files. If the server fails, your website and business consequently fails. Your website isn't able to access files needed for your store’s shopping cart and cash register system to work. These are just some of the consequences you could suffer when you choose the wrong company that uses bad FTP software.

Choosing the right FTP service provider doesn't have to be difficult. While you may find a lot of free FTP programs online, you shouldn't rely on these programs to cater to all your company's needs. Consider the range of features offered by different providers. Never sign up with a service that can’t offer automation and scheduling. Look for a service provider that will allow you to quickly and easily set up sub-accounts for other users as well as configure access permission for each and every sub-account in your group.

Find out other exciting features you can enjoy with SmartFile's online file management service. Take advantage of our free 14-day trial now.

When you’re looking for an online management service for your business, make sure that you choose one that offers a comprehensive range of FTP automatic services.

You should look for a service that will allow you to automatically resume broken transfer. A lot of things could interrupt file uploads and downloads. To save time and avoid further problems, make sure you choose a company that offers automatic uploads, downloads and scheduled backups. This way, you can put file management at the back of your mind because you know you have a trusted company that is managing your files.

When files are uploaded, there are some services which allow you to automate access permission for the newly uploaded files. SmartFile for instance, allows you to determine which users in your group or account can read, write, or execute specific files in the server.

File deletion may also be automated. Once files are uploaded or downloaded to another destination, you can authorize your server to automatically delete the source files. This is one of those tedious and time-consuming tasks that people tend to forget or are reluctant to perform, which is why it’s a great thing if your File Transfer Protocol site can do it for you.

If you have been looking for a convenient and reliable online management service, you should take advantage of our 14-day free trial. Experience how easy managing your data is with a service like ours.

Most companies need efficient business processes to handle the needs of their customers.  If you are looking for a system that can help you with your business transactions, one of the most important things you need to look for is the ability of a system to effectively handle different tasks at the same time. When every second counts, you have to make sure that every online tool that you use keeps up with your speed. You shouldn't get a tool that complicates your tasks more or takes a very long time to finish. A system that allows you to get things done easier and faster is a good investment in any kind of business. 

There are numerous file transfer protocol services on the market today. When looking for a service provider, make sure that it delivers great results. Get a service that has fast FTP upload speed and download capabilities. A good service should also be able to effectively secure your files, automate FTP download and provide scheduled back up. All these features help you manage your business without having to worry about data loss, security issues and back up failures.

SmartFile offers a service that caters to all your file transfer protocol needs at an affordable price. Take advantage of our FREE 14-day trial today.

    On a few occassions I have been asked "Why do I need an FTP client? Can't I do everyting with my FTP site?".  The SmartFile application has many features, but some are better handled by a FTP client. Here are some advantages to using an FTP client.

• Allows you to transfer multiple files as well as directories
• The ability to resume a transfer is the connection is lost
• The ablilty to add items to a "queue" to be uploaded/downloaded
• Many FTP clients have the ability to schedule transfers
• No size limitation on single transfers (browsers only allow up to 2 GB)
• Many clients have scripting capabilities through command line
• Most clients have a synchronizing utility
• Faster transfers then HTTP

Those are just a few of the advantages of using an FTP client. While the clients help make transfers easier they are not without their drawbacks. Here are some of the disadvantages of using and FTP client.

• Usernames, passwords and files are sent in clear text
• filtering active FTP connections is difficult on your local machine (passive is preferred)
• servers can be spoofed to send data to a random port on an unintended computer

In those cases you can see where using the web interface would eliminate these issues. Both FTP clients and the FTP site have their advantages and disadvantages. Fortunately you are able to use them hand in hand depending on your specific needs.

As browsers continue to advance more and more of these features will be worked in. In the future the need for a third party client may be unnecessary, but for now they are really nice to have.

    We have already gone through a few of that FTP programs that we have tested with SmartFile. The newest program I have tested is Auto FTP Manager. The look of the program is pretty standard issue; however, it does offer several unique features.

The first is the server-to-server connection. Most FTP clients only allow you to connect from your local PC to the server. In this case you would need to connect to the server you are requesting files from and download them to your local machine. Once downloaded, you could connect to the second server and upload the files. This can be very time consuming depending on the amount of files you have. Auto FTP allows you to make a connection to server 2 from server 1 and copy files directly between them without making a local copy. This is my favorite feature of the program.

Next is the ability to set up profiles and use rules and filters to automate the file transfer process. An example is that I can create rules so that when I upload files to the server, it will automatically delete them from my local machine when it is finished. Also once the transfer is complete I can move the files to a specific backup folder on the server. This can all be set up to be done automatically everytime I transfer files.

It also has the capabilities to schedule transfers. Using its command line interface and the integrated scheduler it can run as a scheduled task and automatically upload files based on the name, modification date, or file type. In that respect it can almost run as a backup utility. It can run at specific times (hourly, daily, etc.) to FTP files automatically.

There are several other useful features Auto FTP offers. There are only two drawbacks that I see. The first is that it runs on Windows only. It doesnt have a multi platform install like some other FTP programs. The second is the supported protocols. While it does support FTP and FTPS, that is where it stops. It does not have the option to use FTPES which is the secure protol SmartFile uses for FTP.

Overall this is a really good ftp program. I would definately recommed this for a Windows users needing a substantial FTP program.

In a previous post, I explained why PASV mode is the preferred method to connect to an FTP server. That is all well and good, but how do you actually USE PASV mode?

The FTP client that ships with Windows does not support PASV mode. Google will tell you that it does, by using the raw command. However, this is not true, you cannot perform PASV connections using the Windows FTP client. It can only do active connections. So if you are behind a firewall that does not allow this, how do you do command line FTP?

Command line FTP is useful for scheduled operations often performed from a script. On Windows, this might be a batch file executed by the Windows Task Scheduler. Well, if you wish to automate a file transfer in this way, you will almost certainly have to download a third party FTP client that supports PASV data channels.

One FTP client that is available for this task is ncFTP. For uploading or downloading a file inside a script, you can use the ncftpget and ncftpput programs respectively.

For example, to download a file from an FTP server using PASV mode, you can use ncftpget with the following options.

ncftpget -F -u <username> -p <password> <site name>.smartfile.com /path/to/remote C:pathtolocal

You may not have the ability to install the SmartBackup client but still need to backup your files. An easy way to do that without the backup software is by using a FTP batch file. Here is an example of how to do that.

First you need to create a text file with the commands you want to run. We will call this ftpbackup.txt. The file should look like this:

yourUserName
yourPassword
cd backup/folder (select the directory you are backing up to)
binary
prompt n
mput *.*
quit

The mput command copies all of the files from your local folder to the server. If you need to copy files from the server to your local computer use mget. Once you have that file saved you will need to create the batch file. We will call that ftpbackup.bat. It should look like this:

ftp -s:ftpbackup.txt (sitename).smartfile.com

Now that you have your batch file you can run it from a command prompt or set it up as a scheduled task to run as often as you like. Remember this is not as secure as the backup utility. It does store you password in plain text but it will work in a pinch.

SmartFile provides a backup client for Windows. However, if you have Linux servers, it is just as important to back them up as well. Since SmartFile provides FTP access to your space, this task can be easily accomplished with some tools you likely already have installed.

This article will detail the steps to perform a simple, safe, encrypted backup directly to the SmartFile servers. At the end of the article a script will be provided that you can simply install onto your system to perform nightly backups.

Required Tools

Tar is historically for creating Tape ARchives. Thus backing up to a tape would usually involve using tar. Tar has many features including compression and is great for performing backups of Linux systems. Not only can it write to a tape, but also to a file on disk. Further, it can write the archive to stdout, so it can be fed into another program.

OpenSSL is an open source library and command line application that is capable of performing myriad encryption tasks. It is basically the swiss army knife of encryption for Linux systems. For our purposes, we will use it to encrypt our backup file before sending it to the FTP server. By default openssl will read input from stdin and output to stdout. This is perfect for our purposes.

cURL is a network client that is URL driven. It allows uploading or downloading to or from FTP or HTTP servers. For us, the main feature that cURL provides is that you can stream data directly to a file on an FTP server. Let me explain, while most FTP clients will allow you to upload a file from your file system to an FTP server this requires that the file you wish to send to the FTP server already exist on your disk. What is wanted for our backup is a way to “stream” the backup file directly to the FTP server without touching the local disk. cURL provides this with the -T option. If -T is passed – as the file, then the file data is read from stdin.

Now that we are familiar with the tools, let’s take a look at how we will use them all together. Linux allows multiple commands to be chained together by piping the output (stdout) of one command on to the input (stdin) of another command. The | or pipe character is used for this purpose. Thus at a high level, we will be doing the following.

tar | openssl | curl

Tar will create the backup of our system, openssl will then encrypt that backup and curl will transfer it to the FTP server, all without creating any temporary files that we would otherwise need to be cleaned up later.

All that remains is to determine what parameters each of the above commands needs to be given to get the behavior we want.

Tar – Parameters.

To create an archive, you use the c option. To compress the archive using Bzip2, you use the j option. Since we want to back up the entire system, our tar command thus far is.

tar cj /

By omitting any option to save the archive to disk, tar will by default output it to stdout. This allows us to pass the archive data to the next program in our chain without saving it to disk.

There are certain directories within your Linux system that should not be backed up. Some examples are:

• /proc – The proc file system is provided by the Linux kernel and contains information about running programs.
• /sys – The sys file system is provided by the kernel and contains information about hardware.
• /dev – The dev file system consists of device nodes, which represent Linux device drivers.

Backing up the above directories would be folly, as they are provided by the kernel, and some of them (/dev/zero) are actually infinite in size. So, the second set of parameters we will pass to tar will exclude these file systems.
tar cj / --exclude=/proc --exclude=/dev --exclude=/sys

You may also wish to exclude /mnt, as generally you will have other file systems mounted there. These may be remote file systems that are already being backed up via other means. Of course, /mnt may contain file systems that you wish to back up. Your system configuration will dictate your choice here.

OpenSSL – Parameters.

We want openssl to perform encryption, thus we pass it the enc option. Also, I have opted to use the aes-256 algorithm in cbc mode, so we must pass that as well. Finally, openssl requires a key to perform our encryption. This key will be derived from a passphrase, this derivative procedure will use a salt value, so we also provide that option. We will store the passphrase in a file, so that openssl can retrieve it from that file.

openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -salt -pass file:/etc/backup-key

And we can create the key by doing the following.

echo 'This is my backup key!' > /etc/backup-key
chmod 400 /etc/backup-key

Of course, you are well-advised to use something other than the example key above.

cURL – Parameters.

Now, the final step in our backup procedure is to actually transfer the file to SmartFile. We will do this using cURL and the FTP protocol. cURL is driven by URLs, so we must provide one.

curl ftp://www.smartfile.com/backup/

This tells curl to connect to www.smartfile.com and move into the backup directory. However, if the backup directory does not exist, curl will fail. Thus we will ask curl to create it for us if it does not exist.

curl --ftp-create-dirs ftp://www.smartfile.com/backup/

Now, as I alluded to before, we want curl to upload the data that it receives from it’s stdin. This is achieved by using the -T option like so.

curl --ftp-create-dirs -T - ftp://www.smartfile.com/backup/

If we want to use SSL, there are a couple of other options to provide. I suggest skipping SSL if you are already encrypting the backup file. However, if you want to use SSL, you would use the following parameters.

curl --ftp-create-dirs --ftp-ssl --ftp-ssl-reqd --insecure -T - ftp://www.smartfile.com/backup/

We are almost done, the final bit of information that curl needs is a username and password. We could have provided it as part of the URL, but that would expose our credentials to anyone snooping on the machine while the backup is running. It is safer to place the credentials into a file and instruct curl to retrieve them from the file. cURL is capable of doing this using a .netrc file. You can create the .netrc file like so.

echo machine www.smartfile.com login <username> password <password> > ~/.netrc
chmod 400 ~/.netrc

Of course, replace <username> and <password> with your username and password respectively. Now we instruct cURL to use our new .netrc file.

curl --ftp-create-dirs --ftp-ssl --ftp-ssl-reqd --insecure --netrc -T - ftp://www.smartfile.com/backup/

Putting it all together.

Now that you understand the basic building blocks of our backup to FTP solution. Please allow me provide you with a working script. This script was written and tested on CentOS 5.4. Some of the utilities used are out-of-date, for example, the version of curl available from the CentOS repositories uses some deprecated options, on other distributions, you may need to make modifications to these options. You will need to edit the configuration section of the script if you want to customize the behavior.

To install and use this backup script follow the steps below.

Download the script in the following location and ensure it is executable.
wget http://www.smartfile.com/downloads/smartfile-backup.sh -O /usr/local/bin/smartfile-backup.sh
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/smartfile-backup.sh
Customize the configuration section.
Create your key and .netrc files as directed above.
Finally, schedule it to run with cron. The example below will run at midnight every night.
crontab -e
0 0 * * * /usr/local/bin/smartfile-backup.sh
You can also run the script manually to ensure it works properly.

/bin/bash -x /usr/local/bin/smartfile-backup.sh

Restoring from a backup.

To restore the backup, or to retrieve files from the backup you can follow the steps below.

1. Download the backup file.
2. Decrypt the backup file.
3. Use tar to extract what you need.

Download the backup file.

You can either use the SmartFile web interface or FTP to retrieve the file.

Decrypt the backup file.

You can use OpenSSL to decrypt the file. The following command line would do the trick.

openssl enc -d -aes-256-cbc -salt -pass pass:'This is my backup key!' -in full-2010-06-03.tar.bz2 -out full-2010-06-03.tar.bz2.dec

Use tar to extract what you need.

You can either extract the entire archive or a portion of it. Below are commands to perform either task. For more information, read the tar man page..

mkdir /tmp/restore
tar xjf full-2010-06-03.tar.bz2.dec -C /tmp/restore

mkdir /tmp/restore
tar xjf full-2010-06-03.tar.bz2.dec -C /tmp/restore /path/to/file

** Note **
You may receive the following warning during extraction:

bzip2: (stdin): trailing garbage after EOF ignored

This seems harmless, you can get rid of it by either writing the archive to disk before transfer or using gzip instead of bzip2. The archive still decompresses fine, but tar is apparently outputting some additional garbage when using bzip2 and outputting to stdout. I personally still using bzip2 and stdout, as the advantages (greater compression ratio, no temp disk space required) outweigh the disadvantages.