[TriLUG] Scheduling file transfers

[Daniel Zhang]

rsync is really a good choice for your task.  It works perfectly on 
Linux machines. You can even install rsync and ssh on your windows machine.
It could copy only the differences of the file between your server and 
client if the same file already exists.  Furthermore, you can write a 
cron script to run rsync between server and client without bothering of 
any userid and password authentication , if proper set-up being completed.

Some useful links (more links can be found at the second link below):

http://www.jdmz.net/ssh/
http://optics.ph.unimelb.edu.au/help/rsync/

Good luck!

Daniel Z


Mark Freeze wrote:

>A year or so ago I had a problem downloading a file via ftp onto a
>Windows box with WS_FTP.  The file was about 100MB and I started
>downloading the file while my customer was still uploading, so I only
>got about half of the file.  WS_FTP allowed me to do this with no
>error. (Which I thought was kinda crazy.)
>
>Now I have an offsite ftp spot that my customers use to send me files
>at random times during the day. I want to automatically download and
>process these files onto my box as soon as they appear on the site so
>I was thinking that I would scehedule up a cron job to look for these
>files every 10 min. When I do this am I going to have the problem of
>seeing the file and trying to get it as they are uploading?  Some of
>these files are over 100MB and might take my customer a while to
>upload.  Someone told me to make sure that I have exclusive access to
>the file before I download it, but since I have no control over the
>ftp server I'm not sure on how to accomplish that task.
>
>Any help will be greatly appreciated.
>
>Regards,
>Mark.
>  
>