Foxtrot tango, papa?

[undyingking]

Does anyone know of / can recommend a good free / cheap FTP client that'll do reasonably clever and option-laden synching of directory content? Something like WinSCP, only for FTP?

Edit: Being more specific, features I'd like to see include:

* with a small number of clicks, it compares a remote directory (and recurses down into subdirectories) with the previously-specified local equivalent, presents me a list of which files are newer at which end, and will then (again with a small number of clicks) upload or download as appropriate to sych the ones I want to be synched;

* options to include hidden files in the comparison, exclude certain types of files by extension, ...

* remember directory presentation options;

* refresh local directory automatically when changes made in other apps (this seems a simple feature, but I've yet to find it);

* can keep conections to more than one server open at once;

* can configure keep-alive options;

* can synch (as above) remote servers with each other (via invisible local temp copy, presumably);

* easy to chmod, chown, chgrp;

* keps informative log of operations;

* make coffee.

Comments

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I don't really know what you mean by "clever and option-laden", but I've found FileZilla pretty good for general FTP-age and it supports "overwrite if newer", which I assume is what you mean by synching ?

[chrisvenus]

What I would understand by syncing is something like Dreamweaver has built in. You configure an ftp directory on a remote server and tell it where its local equivalent should be. You then download everything and the direcotries remain storngly linked. ie you make a change in subdirectory A and it will know that it uploads to subdir A on the server without you needing to do the usual thing of changing to the local directory with the new file, changing to the remote directory you want it to go into and then clicking and dragging. It does much more clever things. I'm not sure if I've explained it will but it makes it vastly easier not to make a mistake when you are dealing with keeping a local copy of a website synced with the server copy.

I've yet to find a client outside a big product that does this though which is why I occasionally have macromedia stuff installed on my computer.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Ah, OK.

I'd just do this by dragging the root directory across and letting the timestamps sort it all out, but I guess that doesn't work well in more complex cases.

[chrisvenus]

One of the nice things dreamweaver does is when you hit sync gives you a list of what files its going to move so you can check they look about right. I don't personally trust timestamps alone to do this kind of thing. I'm fortunately in the position where the only site I maintain only has six subdirectories so copying things manually isn't that hard. And I can queue files to be batched all at once for if I have files that are dependant on each other. :)

Smart FTP is what I use currently for the record. About twice a year. :)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Timestamps can be a right pain if your remote server is in a different timezone. My main backup server is several hours distant and it took me ages to work out how to prevent competing server timestamps insisting that uploaded files went out of synch with their local equivalents as soon as they appeared on it.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I am actually using Dreamweaver at the moment for this task, but it seems a bit overkill (and also has other annoyances which I won't bore you with here!) I'm not so fussed about having it automatically upload any changed files without me having to tell it to, as I don't use that very often, but it's the other thing you mention below of giving a helpful list of which files are newer at each end which I find valuable. See above for a bit of a clarification of needs..

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I meant a bit more than that -- see above for clarification.