Adventures in FTP

I used to think FTP (or file transfer protocol) was an absolute godsend to someone in my position, who was located outside of the central cities of, for example, London or LA, enabling me to work remotely and exchange files with clients all over the world.

Even saving a few hours driving time here and there for me or clients to deliver drafts means more time actually working on the project. And a slightly smaller carbon footprint

I’d used free services like filesendit.com but they just didn’t float my boat. I much preferred the drag and drop simplicity of ftp interfaces, and the fact you could see all of the files there in the finder window (or whatever the equivalent is on Windows these days, it’s been so long since I used a PC I can’t remember… sign of old age?)

However recently it’s really been ticking me off.

My own ftp space has been causing disconnections and stalling during transfers. Connecting to other ftp sites has been awkward because of syntax variations (having to put ‘ftp.’ in front of the server name instead of ‘ftp://’ lost me an hour or so the other day. I was rather peeved. Though I’m aware this may be an obvious thing to try for some of you more experienced transferrers out there…)

The free software Cyberduck (which was fantastic and served me well for a good few years) and Filezilla both seem to have trouble with my site and don’t auto-resume, a niggly bugbear that ticks me off the morning after the night before I’ve started uploading a big file which should have finished but stalled half way through.

Then there’s the paid ones… I’ve recently been recommended Fetch, which seems to be doing the trick, and Captain FTP, which I tried ages ago so have run out of free trial. I’m sure it’s ok though.

Classic FTP seemed to be working fine for a day then randomly decided it would be awkward and crashed a lot. The autoresume didn’t want to kick in either.

Although it could still just be traffic issues with my ftp host provider, so don’t just take my word for it.

However, as I’m wont to do on occasions like this, I put out a request on twitter for ftp client recommendations and @dovwaterman, a v cool composer based in London (and fellow YouLicense White Label site owner – check out it his music here: Forksound), gave me a heads up to Dropbox.

Dropbox is a desktop-based ftp program that uses Amazon’s S3 technology. Basically it’s free online storage space up to 2GB (more than my paid-for ftp) with faster transfer times, a fantastically simple user interface, automatic sync to all your own computers and idiot-proofed, simple ways of sharing files with other clients computers.

I’ve only just installed it, but think I’m a convert already. It’s still only in beta, but I see a bright future for Dropbox.

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June 17, 2009 · Filed Under Music Business

Comments

4 Responses to “Adventures in FTP”

James Lewis on June 17th, 2009 10:50 pm

Hi there, I found your insite into flaky FTP quite interesting as a company that specialises in enterprise file transfer solutions. We come across this a lot and whilst our solutions are more geared up to enterprise wide deployment there are plenty of hosted solutions that your reader could also check out including box.net, humyo.com and another good one is livedrive.com – hope this is of interest. Cheers James
Joe Griffin on June 25th, 2009 7:12 am

Thanks for the info, Heather. I’ve been struggling with this problem myself (mainly using Fetch but eh…), and I think I’m gonna give Dropbox a try.
Patrick Bryant on July 2nd, 2009 10:57 pm

I’ve been using dropbox for quite awhile and I really like it. I’ve used it on Linux and windows, and my one word of caution is, if you need platform mobility, make sure you don’t name files using characters that will be illegal on a target platform. EG, if your files will have to live on a Win box at some point, don’t use a “:” in a file name or they simply won’t show up.

What I really like about Dropbox is, the protocol (ftp, sftp, nfs, smb, etc.) is kept under the hood. You just have a Dropbox folder and put stuff in it. DB takes care of syncing it in the background, and then you can access the files from anywhere.

-pb
Mark Mosher on July 12th, 2009 4:15 pm

Nice article Heather. Another utility that I like is box.net. Has a nice feature where you can access your files via iPhone and Blacbkerry.

Mark Mosher
http://www.markmoshermusic.com
http://www.modulatethis.com