A free way to synchronize two ftp sites or local directories

Sometimes your colleagues come to you and ask for a favor to simplify their tasks by offering new tools.

Recently, I had a request to find a solution to copy a series of report files from a web server to another FTP server located in another company without any human intervention.

The very first thing that came to my mind was synchronization and related tools.

Synchronizing files among several destinations is one of the tasks that almost every computer engineer has to do these days.

Although a simple copy/paste operation may be a working solution increased number of files and their growing size have made it the worst option.

Nowadays, software tools like Microsoft’s SyncToy brought a simple synchronization framework to the last copy/paste old habit with more efficiency. Although SyncToy is free to use it only supports Windows OS and works on its respective file system.

For what I was asked to do, I needed a tool that could be scheduled for file transfer between Windows directories and FTP servers. There are lots of tools on the Internet that can do such a task using an internal scheduling engine with a suitable GUI but they are not free and you have to pay for them.

If you are a computer expert and you can handle some simple configuration parameters, CyberKiko has provided a light and free package called FTPSync that can be scheduled using Windows Task Scheduler. FTPSync has a GUI that only shows the activity of the software and you have to set configuration parameters using an INI file.

Although this way of configuring the software is not very easy, the online documentation and the sample configuration files are enough to better understand how it works.

To summarize the good and bad points of FTPSync I can say:

Pros:

• supports UNIX, Microsoft, IBM, and Novell-type FTP servers
• able to synchronize two FTP sites or local directories
• only new or changed files are transferred
• console-type application that can be easily executed from various schedulers and batch files
• simple and online documentation
• steady package update and change management

Cons:

• FTPSync is intended for computer experts – it has no user interface, so users must know how to edit standard Windows INI files.

Check out FTPSync today!