Monday, October 26, 2009

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.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

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!