Hi guys, thanks a lot for the feedback (both private and public) on FileWatcher. Believe us, we are hard at work on it and we’ll try to post here our “findings”. 😉
…but now let me tell you a little bit about a feature which some of you requested: is about offsite mirroring of files…
We thought from the beginning at FTP support. Anyway, as perhaps some of you know, doing an FTP client in Delphi is quite easy. But we try to do our best to deliver value to the users at the lowest price.
Also, we have in mind our two way accessing to backup data (Time Machine and Explorer as default OS way of navigation) as a way to enhance the user’s Restore experience.
So, we found a very good solution for you (in our humble opinion), solution which is a little bit unconventional but according to our tests (2030 (two thousand) files and 309 folders FTPed !) the “thing” works very good and not only ‘very good’ but also it will bring you a great added value.
In short, you have a FREE program here which will allow you to see any FTP Server as a regular Windows drive. Think it as a small gift from us with the occasion of Christmas! If you want to use it with FileWatcher fine, if not, fine again. You are free to use it as you wish.
The program is free and as we told above we did extensive tests with it in order to ensure that everything is ok. Yes, we know that there are other solutions to map an FTP Server to a drive letter but this tool provides file and directory caching and it is rather easy to set up.
From our experience, when you set up your FTP connection you must uncheck the checkboxes related to NetView (if, of course, you don’t have NetView) – hence you must edit your server list manually. Also, it is recommended to have the File Name encoding as Windows.
In this way at no extra cost (with some modifications in the program – see bellow) we keep the entire functionality of our Backup and Restore experience while keeping all the OS services like the actions from the right-click popup menu because we work transparently with FTP… …and, of course, with VPN. Yes, we added in the program engine enhancements to support transparently both the FTP and Virtual Private Networks!
What’s new?
We exposed the internal threads which are responsible for mirroring / versioning (see the Options / Queues) allowing you to set priorites and the time (in seconds) which must pass from the last change in order to start the backup process. You have 20 queues which you can assign to different mirrored folders as you wish. But beware, doing the things in parallel doesn’t matter that it will be faster! Remeber, the hard-disk has a head which sometimes gets ‘tired’… 🙂 Our advice (from our benchmarks) is to leave all the monitored folders from the same drive on the same queue. Of course, you are free to do as you wish.
Also, the default value for queue priority is Lower because, remember, the processes are done in background. But if you want to play with it…
Oh, and the most important thing: The links.
The updated version of the Installer (for the ones which didn’t downloaded it yet) is here (in the same place with the old one which got overwritten)
The updated version of the Program (for the ones who doesn’t want to uninstall/install again – just to copy the executable over the old one) is here.
If someone else has anything to say here we are eager to listen!
(PS: About compression? Differential Compression? hmmm… it was one of our first ideas. 🙂 Drop ideas but beware – we’ll have a special post on this. After some special posts about the Christmas we’ll be back of our theme. Stay tuned.)
Wings of Wind Software 
Now if you had an ScpDrive, that would be really nice!
–jeroen
What do you mean by Scp?
Secure Copy Protocol?
If yes, then SCP is superseeded by SFTP (see the link above) and the small utility which we provided supports SFTP (if, of course, the remote server supports it). Beware, though, the FTPDrive needs the OpenSSL DLLs but doesn’t provide them. You can find them in the FileWatcher directory (there are two dlls libeay32.dll and ssleay32.dll – copy them to the FtpDrive directory and set it up accordingly).
I’m a bit old skool, so I meant any secure copy protocol, including both SFTP and SCP. Many systems support them (including OpenSSH, OpenSSL and – one of my favourite windows tools – WinSCP).
I’ll try with the DLL’s and see how it goes.
–jeroen
Novel NetDrive already does all this for me. It is also free.
Thanks for sharing it.
Yes we know about NetDrive but we had different opinions about it and finally we decided to go with FtpDrive. This doesn’t mean that we disregard NetDrive (or any other tool from the category). On contrary, we’re all ears to hear your experiences with it. From how log do you use it? Can you do a comparison with FtpDrive? (you can send it through eMail – perhaps in a comment is hard to put all the stuff). What do you like and what do you dislike at it?
TIA