A free way for FTP sync and backup

I’ve spent some hours searching for a free way of syncing local folders (backup copies) to my websites. I wanted a program to look at my ftp file tree, compare it with the local copy and download ONLY the changed files (determined by size and modification date) to my computer. The reverse of the operation was optional for me.

Although this seems like an easy task, I had very hard time to find a free solution to this problem. I’m primarily running Mac OSX and I’ve given up on this platform quite early and searched for programs running on the windows platform (I run XP as a virtual machine under OSX). And even in windows, it was a hard find for a simple task. Before giving up with FTP clients, the last client I tried was the free version of SmartFTP and it had some settings like “file-exists rules” but I just couldn’t get them to work. It was always overwriting my files without looking at the modification dates and/or sizes.

During my search I found a software doing backup/synchronization for local files which had a reduced free version, called SyncBack. It really is a nice software but the free version I tried only works with local files (I don’t know maybe that is also the case with the full version). Then I tried to find a software that would map my FTP site as a local drive on my system. SyncBack: If it looks local, we can sync it!

The first software I tried, called FTPDrive, didn’t work on my virtual Windows XP machine for some reason. Then I found a piece of software called NetDrive from Novell. You should use google to find a copy of it, as there are some licensing issues with it, so Novell is not distributing it. I’m not sure about the details.

NetDrive is doing its job properly for me, you set your FTP account from its configuration, press connect, and you can see it as a drive under “My Computer”. SyncBack now can see the contents properly and you can sync your folders without problems. I haven’t tried it but I’m pretty sure, Total Commander with its “compare directories” feature will do the trick too. There is one thing to keep in mind about NetDrive: Before taking a backup, right click on its tray icon, select your drive and select “Flush Cache”, otherwise, SyncBack polls old info. Using these two free tools, backing up stuff from remote to local(and vice versa) should be painless.