Thanksgiving Promotion for CrossFTP

Thanksgiving is coming, and we are providing 50% off promotion for CrossFTP Pro's license. The promotion is available from now to the end of Nov. Get a license for CrossFTP now at our buy page and enjoy it!
Thanks for using our product. Let us know if you have any suggestions or comments.

How to Synchronzie Folders in CrossFTP

Synchronization and Backup are two common tasks for FTP and cloud storage users. You are allowed to do synchronization and backups for any two folders on Amazon S3, WebDav, FTP, iDisk, or your own computer in CrossFTP Pro. To do the synchronization, simply choose Tools -> Synchronize Directories... The synchronization dialog will be displayed as follows:

The left and right top edit box shows the two folders you are trying to synchronize on. A number of options are provided in this Synchronization Dialog.

What to Sync

Describe the content that will be synchronized/backup.

• Include, exclude - the patterns for you to include or exclude in the synchronization. It is a comma-separated list of patterns of files that must be included/excluded. When both inclusion and exclusion are used, only files/directories that match at least one of the include patterns and don't match any of the exclude patterns are used. If no include pattern is given, all files are assumed to match the include pattern (with the possible exception of the default excludes). The default excludes are empty in CrossFTP. The definition of the patterns can be found here.
  
• Include Sub Directories - whether sub directories should be included for the synchronization.
• Follow Symbolic Link - whether the symbolic link should be followed or just treated as a normal file. If symbolic link needs to be followed, linked file/directory will be retrieved. 

How to Sync

Describe the way how the comparison should be made for two directories' synchronization.

• Mirror Left to Right - Treat the Left side directory as the basis, and copy every files from left to right. If a file with the same name appeared simultaneously on the left and right, and two files are checked as different, the right side file will be overwritten. If a file appears only on right, you can choose to keep it, or by choosing "Delete Unnecessary Files" to delete it.
• Ignore Date - If it is checked, CrossFTP does not compare the file's last modified date, and treat them as the same if they have the same size. If it is not checked, two files with same size are treated as different if they have the last modified date differ larger than a given threshold. If your server has a different time zone with your client machine, you can setup the difference between your server and your machine at Site Manger -> Actions.
  
• Delete Unnecesary Files - In the Mirror Left to Right mode, if a file appears only on right, the right side file will be overwrited if this option is selected. Otherwise, no action will be performed on the right side file.
• Case Sensitive - whether the file name's comparison are case sensitive.

Preview your Synchronization/Backup Result

• Preview - Preview the synchronization result. It will retrieve all the matching files from the synchronization directories, compare the files, and then list the comparison result on the synchronization table below. 
• Stop - Stop the Preview.
• Help - Get help information of synchronization.

Filters

Filters options help you to refine the synchronization results by a number of directions and criteria. Only filtered results will be appeared in the final synchronization process.

• Right Direction - Keep or filter all the items that need to copy towards right side.
• Left Direction - Keep or filter all the items that need to copy towards left side.
• Equal - Keep or filter all the items that left and right sides are treated as equal.
• Unequal - Keep or filter all the items that left and right side are treated as unequal.
• Last Modified in - You can define the number and interval (days, hours, minutes) that the file's last modified time should be within. If selected, only items that meets the last modified condition are appeared in the result set.

Synchronization Actions

These buttons help you to add the previewed sync content to the queue, or save the current synchronization tasks in the queue.

• Synchronize - Put the previewed result set in the queue and close the synchornization dialog.
• Queue Settings - Save the what, how, and filters setting in the queue as one queued synchronization item. You can start the queue to process this synchroniztion item by the queue processing engine, shedule this sycn item for future processing, save/load this queue, or modified the sycn item in the synchorniztion dialog. After press this button, the synchornization item will be added in the current queue. If you edit a sycnchronization item in the queue, this Synchronization Dialog will be displayed for modification, and this button's text will be shown as Save.
  
• Close - Close the synchronization dialog and do nothing. 

Schedule or Save the Synchronization/Backup Task


You can schedule all the tasks in the queue. Since you can queue the synchronization task in the queue (use Queue Settings button), you can simply schedule the queued sync item (Queue -> Advanced -> Schedule...), or save this queue for future usage (Queue -> Manage Queue -> Save Queue...).

Example

Here we will show an example for you to understand our synchronization/backup process. If you want to backup local machine's forum => remote Amazon S3's forumOld, you can go to local machine's folder in the left pane, remote Amazon S3's folder in the right pane, and choose Tools -> Synchronize Directories... After that, left (source) and right (target) folder's edit box will be automatically filled in with the folders mentioned before. After that, you should choose "include sub directories" and "Mirror Left to Right" options, and then press Preview button. All the results will be displayed in the table below after calculation is made. Finally you can press Synchronize button to add the Sync results in the queue, or if you are satisfied with the setting, use Queue Settings button to store this sync dialog's setting in the queue, so that you can schedule/edit this setting in future. You can also check this link for a screencast.

Conclusion

With the powerful synchronization and backup engine provided in CrossFTP Pro, it is a nice synchronization tool available for your FTP, FXP, WebDav, iDisk, and Amazon S3. Meanwhile it works well on Windows, Mac, and Linux. We hope you will find our post useful and enjoy the easiness of CrossFTP Pro. As always we appreciate your feedback as it helps to make the product better!

How to use CrossFTP as an Excellent WebDAV Client and iDisk Client?

WebDav is a collaborative file management protocol being widely used in a lot of cloud storage and content management systems, such as MobileMe iDisk, SharePoint, Alfresco, etc. It extends the HTTP protocol to make the Web a readable and writable medium, and it has much better firewall/router compatibility than the traditional FTP protocols. CrossFTP Pro is an excellent WebDav client with excellent reliability and performance, and it offers a lot of value-added services than the operating system's bulid-in clients.

In the following we will show how to connect to the WebDav site in CrossFTP PRO, and some unique features available in the CrossFTP Pro. For the MobileMe iDisk's access, please check this page.

To get a WebDav account:

1. Normally your WebDav service provider will give you the account information.
   
2. If you have not got a WebDav account yet, you may register a traditional host provider (such as bluehost), or you can create a WebDav server on your own machine (such as Apache HTTP server with WebDav mod).
3. After successful registration/creation of your WebDav account, you will get your WebDav server's host, port, user name, and password.

To connect to a WebDav account:

1. Create a new site in CrossFTP, and choose the Protocol field as WebDav (default port is 80) or WebDav/HTTPS (default port is 443). After that, fill in the Host filed with your server's host, and Port field with your server's port.
2. Enter your User Name field with user name, and Password field with password information, and press Connect to connect to the FTP Server.
3. Setup your site's web URL (optional). If you want to preview your web pages, or copy the page's URL address, you can fill in the Remote Path field with your site page files' root path on your server (e.g., /public_html), and the Web URL field with your site's root URL (e.g., http://www.crossftp.com/). After that, you will be able to copy the page's URL, or preview the pages in your favorite web browser.

WebDav's Value-Added Services available in CrossFTP Pro

• Lock and Unlock - Used to put or remove a lock on the resource. WebDav server normally supports both shared and exclusive locks. You can choose the Lock, Unlock, or Show Locks in the CrossFTP Pro file panel's context menu.
• Schedule the Queued Item - Batch transfer your data in the queue, and schedule the transfer task. You can choose the schedule option in the Queue's context menu -> Advanced -> Schedule.
  
• Synchronization - Synchronize the folders for your WebDav servers. You can choose it at Tools -> Synchronize Directories...
• Remote Edit - Edit your remote WebDav files directly.
• and much more, such as WebDav-to-WebDav copy, move to, rename, certification management, and more..

Conclusion

With the reliability and performance provided in CrossFTP Pro, it is recognized as the top WebDav client and iDisk tool available on the market. In addition, CrossFTP Pro also supports the SFTP, FXP, and Amazon S3 protocols, and it works well on Windows, Mac, and Linux. We hope you will find our post useful and enjoy the easiness of CrossFTP Pro. As always we appreciate your feedback as it helps to make the product better!

How to setup custom metadata or http headers for Amazon S3 objects in CrossFTP?

If you are using Amazon S3 to serve your files over http, you will get an additional flexibility to custom http headers could provide.  For instance if you properly set Cache-Control http header, it will help you to reduce your Amazon S3 bills.

You can set up http-headers for the files already located in S3 buckets. Just select the file you want to set headers for and right click it. Choose Properties... from the context menu, and you will see the Metadata table in the Advanced tab. 

The content of the metadata Table shows the headers metadata that are already assigned to the file. Most of them are assigned by Amazon S3 by default.

If you want to add a custom http header metadata, just click + button and type a name/value pair for the header.

 Click ok and the new header will appear in the Metadata Table. Click Commit, and the header will be applied to the file on S3. Next time someone requests this file from the web browser, the new http header will take effect. 

Can I set headers for multiple files at once?

Yes. Just multi-select the files that you want to set headers for and follow the instructions above. If you want to apply for the subfolders as well, toggle the option "Apply changes to subfolders".

Commonly Used HTTP Headers for Cache:

See http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html for more details.

• Expires:
  

      Key: "Expires" 
      Value: HTTP-date

An example of its use is

Expires: Thu, 01 Dec 1994 16:00:00 GMT

Note: if a response includes a Cache-Control field with the max-
      age directive (see section 14.9.3), that directive overrides the
      Expires field.

• Cache-Control:
  

    Key: "Cache-Control" 
    Value: cache-directive

cache-directive = cache-request-directive
         | cache-response-directive

cache-request-directive =
           "no-cache"                          ; Section 14.9.1
         | "no-store"                          ; Section 14.9.2
         | "max-age" "=" delta-seconds         ; Section 14.9.3, 14.9.4
         | "max-stale" [ "=" delta-seconds ]   ; Section 14.9.3
         | "min-fresh" "=" delta-seconds       ; Section 14.9.3
         | "no-transform"                      ; Section 14.9.5
         | "only-if-cached"                    ; Section 14.9.4
         | cache-extension                     ; Section 14.9.6

cache-response-directive =
           "public"                               ; Section 14.9.1
         | "private" [ "=" <"> 1#field-name <"> ] ; Section 14.9.1
         | "no-cache" [ "=" <"> 1#field-name <"> ]; Section 14.9.1
         | "no-store"                             ; Section 14.9.2
         | "no-transform"                         ; Section 14.9.5
         | "must-revalidate"                      ; Section 14.9.4
         | "proxy-revalidate"                     ; Section 14.9.4
         | "max-age" "=" delta-seconds            ; Section 14.9.3
         | "s-maxage" "=" delta-seconds           ; Section 14.9.3
         | cache-extension                        ; Section 14.9.6

cache-extension = token [ "=" ( token | quoted-string ) ]

Conclusion

With the ability to set custom http headers CrossFTP Pro is becoming a compelling tool for Amazon S3 users, in particular to web site developers who want to have granular control on how the files are handled by web browser. The more important thing is that, caching can significantly lower your Amazon S3's monthly bills.

CrossFTP 1.55a Released

CrossFTP is an excellent FTP client. CrossFTP Pro is a FTP client supporting SFTP, FXP, WebDav, Sun Cloud Storage and Amazon S3.

CrossFTP 1.55a is a major update, which includes:
* Significantly enhances Amazon S3 support with Metadata modification, gzip transfer compression, logging, MIME types modification, etc.
* Improves the compatibility for Snow Leopard and Windows 7
* Adds the OS/2,Netware, glFTPd ansi-color, etc., listing support, and SFTP/SSH's command and archiving support
* Introduces ident-server protocol support
* Adds checksum support in the property dialog
* Provides a lot of bug fixes
This is a free update, and is recommended for all CrossFTP Users.

How to Make Huge Batch Transfers in CrossFTP?

In the could computing era, you may need to transfer huge amount of data from one data center to another. No matter this is on an Amazon S3 cloud platform, or a traditional FTP platform, you need a reliable tool to save your headaches. Here we will show you some guides on how to address the huge batch transfers problems in the CrossFTP to save your life.

1. Add the transfer to the queue. When a huge number of files are selected in the source panel, you will experience problems if you want to Drag & Drop the files to the target. This is due to that the the Drag & Drop goes through the system's clipboard, which has a size limitation. To deal with this problem, you can open the context menu, and choose Transfer/Copy or Queue from this menu. This will directly add the files in the CrossFTP's task queue without going through the system's clipboard. You can see the following figure for the clarification. Meanwhile, you may improve the stability by disabling the directory pane's bundling (which updates the bundled directory pane's content according to the current transfer) by Tools -> Global Options -> Transfer -> Bundle Directory Content during Transfer.

2. Address the memory limit if there is a one (Optional). The CrossFTP program's default maximum heap memory limit is 512Mb. If your transfer queue is so big that the CrossFTP has no enough heap memory for the allocated queue, you can try to increase this memory limit by adding the startup memory flag in CrossFTP's execution script. Windows XP has 2G memory limit; 32-bit systems (Mac OS X, Linux, or Solaris) have maximum 4G limit, while 64bits systems have much higher maximum limit. The command to setup the heap size in Java virtual machine is -Xms (for the initial heap size) and  -Xmx (for the maximum heap size). For example, the following line in the execution script setups CrossFTP to use 128m as initial heap size, and 512m as maxium heap size:

java -Xms128m -Xmx512m ...crossftp_other_startups...

3. Error recovery.  All your transfer history can be found in the Logs -> Transfer history. You can check that to see if there is anything wrong with the batch transfer. Meanwhile, if CrossFTP crashes during a long time batch transfer, you can always recover the transfer when the CrossFTP restart. Just choose the Recovery Mode on the Queue Restore Dialog, and your crashed queue file can be found and reloaded in this mode.

We hope you will find our post useful and will enjoy the easiness of CrossFTP Pro. As always we appreciate your feedback as it helps to make the product better!

What has kept us Being Busy in CrossFTP

There has been for a short period of silence on this web site. During this period, we are busy improving our CrossFTP client. Here highlights a few major improvements we are under going:

 Enhanced Amazon S3 Support

• The S3 head metadata's modification support. You can easily modify and add metadata on one or multiple files stored on S3 site. For example, you can add cache-control header like "max-age" or "expires" with a time value for your S3 files. This will help you to specify the browser cache's living time, and save your cost.

• Data compression for S3 file transfers. GZip based data compression is now supported by CrossFTP Pro. Just choose Site Manger -> Options -> Data Compression. After that, all files upoads for this site will be automatically compressed. In the log window, you should be able to find the messages like "GZip Compressed". The download process will automatically uncompress the files on the fly. Need to mention that, we also support FTP and SFTP protocol's data compression by toggling this option. That is, if your chosen protocol is FTP, compression will be made by Mode Z on the fly, and if your chosen protocol is SFTP/SSH, the compression will be made by zlib on the fly. To save your bandwidth and cost, you can try this easy and powerful option.
• Log configurations for the buckets and CloudFront Distribution. Now we have provided those Amazon S3's logging configuration GUI. We think you will like it.
• Data encryption. Security is an important issue when you put your data on the cloud. This support in CrossFTP Pro is still under working to figure out what is the best way.
  
• Various bug fixes. We use the virtual directory simulation to simulate the folder structures for your S3 files. Separator character "/" in your s3 object's key is treated as a folder symbol. Some of your folders may not have such placeholders objects (due to your files are created by some other tools, etc.), we will ask you whether you want to add the placeholder objects to your S3 site. If the answer is yes, we will help to fix the virtual directory problem.

Enhanced SFTP/SSH Command Support

• Execute your command directly on your SFTP/SSH site. SSH protocol allows you to login and execute command on your remote site. Now CrossFTP Pro directly supports such command execution. It works similar with the FTP's command execution. Check Manage FTP Sites by FTP commands.
  
• Remote Archive/Extraction support. If you wants to upload/download a lot of small files, the best way to save your time is to archive them before the transfer and extract them after the transfer. The problem is that the remote site cannot archive/extract your zip files. No, this is not a problem anymore. Now it is supported in CrossFTP Pro for SFTP protocol. You should have a try and save your time for transferring.

More FTP Listing Format Support

Here are the list of format we supported in the previous versions:

• Unix ls (ProFTPd, Wu-FTPd, Microsoft FTP and many others)
• DOS (Microsoft FTP and others)
• VMS and MultiNet (both single and multiline)

We now added the following list format support:

• OS/2
• OS/400
• Netware
• Connect:Enterprise Unix
  
• glFTPd ansi-colored list
• support for custom list parsers

Misc Enhancements

• Improved Snow Leopard and Windows 7 support. This few months are busy days for the operating system. We will keep our software good on that.
  
• Ident-server protocol support. This is an ancient protocol, but when you need it, you should be able to use it. Now this is added in CrossFTP Pro.
• Checksum for MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512, and CRC32 are supported.
• And a lot of various bug fixes!
  

CrossFTP 1.55a is a major update and will be released soon, which includes most of the above enhancement. This is a free update, and is recommended for all CrossFTP Users.