How can I transfer files from one server to another server using FTP

Question

How can I transfer remote files from one FTP server straight to another FTP server?

Answer 1

You can use a FTP program that supports the FXP protocol and your two servers need to support it too. Here's a few FTP applications that support FXP protocol:

• SmartFTP
• FlashFXP
• CuteFTP Pro

An non-FXP alternative method could be to use WinSCP using pushing and pulling.

Answer 2

You could use an app like WebDrive, which mounts remote FTP drives as if they were local drives (called a 'virtual drive'), then simply drag and drop the files from one virtual drive to the other on your own machine.

How it works

1. Download WebDrive here. (Mac or Windows, free 20-day trial)
2. Put in the FTP details for your http://example.com server to create the first virtual drive.
3. Put in the FTP details for your http://example.org server to create the second virtual drive.
4. Browse to the files you want to copy on the first virtual drive, and drag them to the second virtual drive.

WebDrive will copy them from the first FTP location to your machine (you don't see this step; it happens in the background), then copy them to the second FTP location for you. This is the closest you'll get to copying directly between FTP servers, without using the FXP protocol, which isn't widely supported yet.

WebDrive alternatives
In addition to WebDrive, you might also like to consider Transmit (Mac only) or Expandrive (Mac and Windows), which both offer the same remote disk mounting feature. (I use Transmit's Disk feature every day to save optimised images directly to the FTP server straight from Photoshop/Fireworks. It's great, but Expandrive and WebDrive both do this too.)

Answer 3

If you have SSH access to the source server then you can login to it and use the ftp command to start an ftp session with the destination server. You would need to use the command line to type in the ftp commands but it's not too hard and you can find tutorials online about it. For example: http://linux.about.com/od/commands/l/blcmdl1_ftp.htm

Answer 4

EDIT: I just saw that you're using Windows. You'll need something like Cygwin to emulate the Unix toolkit on Windows. Alternatively, you could use something like WinSCP.

As alexus pointed out, SCP is a great option. Another option is Unix/Linux's rsync (available on almost all Unix-based machines). It's a utility that's frequently used for back-ups.

For transferring between two servers, abc.com and xyz.com:

rsync -avzPe ssh [email protected]:/source/ /destination/on/abc

A more practical example:

rsync -avzPe ssh [email protected]:~/public_html/ ~/public_html/

A few notes: The above example assumes you're logged into server abc.com. If you desire to go the other way, switch the arguments. The user (admin in this case) also needs to have appropriate SSH access. Finally, the flags that I used aren't necessarily the only ones that will work, they're just ones that I tend to use. You can technically do without -v and -P, you'll just see less useful console output.

Answer 5

If you have SSH access the best way would be to use NIX tar command (compress), and then using scp to transfer it over new hosting and then again using tar to uncompress, and keep a copy on your local drive for backup purposes.