Secure FTP Software

We are testing a system of secure file transfers over the web. To maintain up-to-date copies of servers and data we need an automated and secure system to move new and updated files.

There is quite a wide choice of software in this area so we have had to a bit of research.

At the receiving end - the secure remote server - we are using a product called Gene6. http://www.gene6.com/ This software can accept secure encrypted connections and we are able to set up these transaction on custom, non-standard port numbers. This software has been working very well. It accepts up to twenty five concurrent connections and has several nice reporting tools to monitor traffic and bandwidth.

At the client end we have had to do a bit more work. We originally set up a software that was recommended to us: BatchSynch. This software is designed to first make a secure connection, then analyze the files at either end and build a list of files that need to be transferred. Like Robocopy, it will then only copy new and updated files. The program works well during the comparison stage but it had a tendency to crash during the transfer phase. As these initial copy jobs could be very large: ten to twelve hours, this was very annoying.

I spent a lot of time obsessively watching the band width graphs and restarting jobs remotely. Of course, jobs would inevitably fail as soon as I stopped watching them!
Here is an example. The red line indicates the number of threads running - the scale is on the right. The other lines reflect the amount of data being transferred. You can see that at 10:48 the jobs crashed and had to be restarted. Everything is running fine at 11:15 PM:

And here is the chart from another night. A job I had hoped would run all night crashed just after midnight. It was restarted at nine and then crashed again while I was at lunch!

This was wasting a lot of time and was not a reliable solution. I searched for other software and found Other contenders:

• Acronis: http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/download/ATIESWin/
  
• Backup Platinum: http://www.backup-platinum.com/
  
• Almersoft: http://www.almersoft.com/products/backup/
  
• CuteFTP Professional. http://www.cuteftp.com/
  

Acronis offers a suite of network backup and restore software that sounds very powerful. We could not find a way to make it work over our secure FTP setup however.

Backup Platinum is another backup software. One of the features is that it can send a backup image to an FTP site. But we could not get it to work using secure FTP. It would not log in to make the connection.

Almersoft also provides a backup software. As with Backup Platinum, we could not find a way to configure it to connect to our secure FTP server.

CuteFTP is a popular software that has been around for a long time. CuteFTP Professional was a solution that looked like to could work for us. This software is similar to BatchSync. It can communicate through secure FTP. It does not build a list of changed and new files first, but it can be programmed to skip unchanged files. Functionally, this delivers the same result. So far CuteFTP has not crashed during an upload, but the interface does have a tendency to freeze during long sessions. After it freezes, one cannot get a report on whether the job ran successfully or not.

Both BatchSync and CuteFTP can be scheduled, which is very important for our application. BatchSynch uses Windows task scheduler to run a command line version of itself. It can also be set up to send email reports on the success of failure of tasks. CuteFTP uses it's own scheduling tool. It appears that CuteFTP requires the local user to be logged in for the scheduled task to run.

Both of these tools accomplish the same thing in slightly different ways. We will be using CuteFTP for the simple reason that it is more stable in our environment. Testing before selecting software is economical in this case as all the products mentioned above are available in thirty day trial versions.

Keep in mind that our testing was only on our network and we evaluated these products based on our criteria. You may have different needs and a different environment. You should take the time to evaluate each product for your specific needs.

I would think that this type of software will become more common. Replicating data to a live, web accessible server is a far superior solution to using backup tapes or removable drives. The cost of hardware and bandwidth capacity now make this a cost effective and viable.