FTP Upload Program

File transfer protocol or FTP continues to be the simplest and most efficient way to transfer files from one computer or account to another. It was first utilized in the 1970s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or MIT. In the early days, FTP had also been the preferred method for downloading heavy files.

In the field of computing and information technology, the use of the word ‘protocol’ always refers to standards or rules prescribed to govern interaction between systems. In the case of file transfer protocol, this simply means that they provide the necessary rules to standardize sharing or transfer of files.

FTP and HTTP should not be confused with each other. With hyper text transfer protocol (HTTP), server data is transferred to your computer through our web browser. With file transfer protocol, it can go both ways.

Having backup data online is critical when you're managing websites, online businesses, or maintaining software programs of any sort. If you're in charge of website maintenance, having an account on a file sharing site that can automate FTP download would be greatly beneficial to your work. With this type of service, you're be able to save yourself a lot of time as you don't have to perform repetitive tasks. Once you've entered the necessary commands, the server will automatically perform the required tasks whenever you've uploaded or modified files.

Take advantage of SmartFile's FTP services by signing up for our 14-day free trial today.

If you’re looking for a file transfer protocol upload program for your website or business, make sure to look for a program offering the features listed below.

User-friendly Interface
The interface must be something that even first-time users or those new to FTP would not have any difficulties using.

Web-based Transfer
The service must allow you to quickly and easily upload files to the server via your web browser. If it works with all the commonly used browsers like Windows Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox then consider that as an additional advantage.

Built-in Editor
The best programs also allow clients to modify HTML and other types of files with use of their built-in editor. This would allow you to manage your files anywhere anytime and using any computer or any other Internet-ready device.

Upload and Download Speeds
The service must also be able to retrieve and display files quickly. For this to happen, your preferred FTP hosting website should have a sufficient number of Internet pipes and data centers working with their system.

SmartFile can cater to all your online data management needs. Try our free14-day trial now and find out how easy and convenient it is to manage files online.

Investing in a reliable online media storage especially if you manage large files is a must for any business. You can quit worrying about losing important files when your hard drive suddenly fails or if you experience technical glitches in your company's network. Aside from the convenience of being able to back up, secure and access your files wherever you are, SmartFile is giving you another reason to love our FTP upload site and online management service.

If you are looking for another way to increase your profit, take advantage of our Private Label Program and offer our services to your clients and business network. You don't have to know a lot about File Transfer Protocol and online management to be a reseller. With our reseller kit and great team of integration specialists, you will be successful in selling our services to others. We will help you set up your reseller business and even allow you to use our marketing materials so you don't have to worry about presenting our services to your prospective clients. 

If you sign up for our reseller program, you get our great service and more. Why keep the service to yourself when you can have other people enjoy the same service while you earn a profit at the same time? Take advantage of this offer now.

Many companies have started using File Transfer Protocol to exchange data within their systems and send large files to their clients. With FTP, you can secure your data by restricting access to unauthorized personnel and using other security features to protect your company's  information. File Transfer Protocol alone is already a secure method of transferring files, however, if you want more security for your company's data, you can opt for Secure File Transfer Protocol or SFTP.

Network File Transfer is the most efficient way of moving documents online. More than the exchange of files, SFTP is useful in maintaining your website. As a website developer, you can add this feature and a lot more to your offered package and have your clients upload their business data through your system.

Taking advantage of SmartFile's Privacy Label Program is a good alternative to earning profit from your already established online community or business. You don't even have to be very knowledgeable on File Transfer Protocol concepts to be a successful reseller. One of our integration specialists will help you get everything done so you can start earning immediately. You can also use our marketing materials to help you sell our services to your established clientele.

Sending big files over the Internet can be frustrating, especially if you are beating a deadline. There are many ways to send large files. Some of the popular options are to send files via email or to use a FTP Program. Using an email service to send large files is not recommended as you may have problems with file size limits and number of files you can send per email. FTP Programs, on the other hand, allow you to send and transfer large files conveniently.

Today, there are numerous options you can use to transfer and send huge files with ease. While using an email service may still look appealing to most people, there is a high risk of having your email account accessed by unauthorized individuals. Another option, and the best there is, is the use of online storage. Online storage can be compared to one’s very own hard drive online. Here, you can easily upload and manipulate your files regardless of the file size. In addition, your files can be accessed from any part of the globe.

If you want a better and faster way to send and store huge files, sign up for SmartFile's 14 day trial for free today.

    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

When transferring large files to your SmartFile account it is best to use an FTP program. Filezilla is a simple one to use, and best of all its FREE! It allows you to make a quick FTP connection by providing just the site address, username, and password. If you prefer, you can set up site connections with more advanced options. For example, it supports FTPES which is the protocol SmartFile uses for Secure File Transfers. 

Another benefit to using an FTP program is the ability to resume transfers. There is nothing worse then being in the middle of an upload and losing your internet connection. An FTP program will resume where it left off once the connection is reestablished. 

There are countless other benefits to using an FTP program.  Click here to view a short video to see how to configure your account through FileZilla. 

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.

Let’s face it, most people in Information Technology love control. Control over systems, control over data, and most importantly control over YOU. I’m not suggesting these are bad characteristics to possess when you are trying to protect your company’s most crucial asset, such as your data. Let’s face it, I would be a little nervous if the thing that kept me gainfully employed was taken away from me because it was cheaper and easier than having it in-house. This often creates a problem when a person on the business side of the company needs to make a decision based on the limited amount of information he or she is getting from IT.

This article is written to outline the expected costs involved in getting your FTP solution in place, thus giving you the facts when it comes to making an important business decision. There are several ways to go about configuring an FTP server, below is the most common:

1. Hardware ($2500)
Price ranges on processor speed and how much hard drive space you need. Here are the specs of a slimmed down server:

• Dual Xeon 1.83Ghz Processors
• Windows Server Web Edition
• 1 Terabyte of storage
• Raid 5 (For hard drive redundancy)
• 4 Gigs of Memory
• 3 Year ProSupport

• Serv-U ($199-$999)
• GlobalScape ($696 – $1,995)
• FileZilla – (FREE)

• Configure Windows
• Purchase SSL (If security is a concern)
• Configure Network 

                   - IP addresses
                   - Hostnames
                   - Firewall Provisioning

• Configure FTP software
• Configure Backups 

                 - Create user accounts 
                 - Create directories
                 - Create file system permissions
                 - FTP server permissions

5. Support (Ongoing)
Must have tech-savvy person on staff to do the following:

• Manage
• Backup
• Troubleshoot problems
• Apply patches to server
• Upgrade
• Monitor

It’s easy to say that you can spend $5000 in creating an FTP server that people can use, not to mention ongoing costs. Cost aside, it will still not have features like custom branding, a web interface that allows anyone to upload/download a file, and a way for any non-IT person to administer.

Before making the decision to bring FTP in-house, I would highly suggest giving SmartFile a try (for as little as a $108.00 a year). Who knows, you might even make your IT person happy.
A Dell PowerEdge server  

 FTP (File Transfer Protocal) has been around since before me. I think??? There are hundreds of companies trying to replace FTP with their own version of software or services that move files. Unfortunately no matter how innovative they think they are, it’s hard to replace a good thing.