How to do a scheduled ftp from dos?

[DDogg]

Thought one of you might be able to help me. I volunteer for a small private school to keep their 20 plus computers up and running. They basically have no budget for this type of thing.

One of the things I would like to do is have their XP accounting machine do an off-site backup of the accounting data, but without paying for a special service. I'm thinking I could schedule a completely automated daily batch file to encrypt and compress with pkzip, and then FTP it to their website. I think I can dredge up some old memory and remember the pkzip part, but I don't know diddle about using ftp from a command-line, much less completely automating it.

Do you guys think this would work OK? If so, a little help with the batch would be appreciated. If not, any other suggestions are welcome and would be appreciated. I need to do this on a shoestring budget and use their existing website for the storage if possible [unless some of you think that a bad idea]. I think the amount of data is like 250 megs. It is from quick books pro.

[Manao]

I would do it with cygwin. You'd then get a good shell and lftp, a good command line ftp client.

[DDogg]

easy for you to say! :) I'm afraid that might be a little above my skill level, especially without a few example lines. Is there something wrong with the dos ftp? Actually I only assumed it could be run in an automated process. That may not even be correct?

/Add: Google to the rescue (http://www.michael-thomas.com/tech/ftp/dosftpnotes.htm). This does not seem too difficult after all. The negative thing is you need a text file which would have your password in the open. That's not real cool.

[b0b0b0b]

There is an awesome program called "foldershare"

I use it to move files between work & home.

Basically it is something you start via your windows startup folders that monitors a directory for changes in files, and then sends the changes to any subscribing foldershares. It has support for uPNP, but if you don't have that, you only need to poke one hole in your firewall. For small files(not sure of the size), neither side needs to have holes in their firewalls-- the foldershare.com people will act as a proxy for you transparently.

This code is based on rsync, but has gone far far beyond rsync.

The free version will let you create 2 shares of 1500 files each, unlimited size.

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sidebar:

I use this for doing bittorrent downloads from work without needing to vnc into my home machine. I download a .torrent into a directory at work & foldershare sends the .torrent to my home machine. Azureus monitors that directory and picks up the .torrent file. Once the download at home completes, azureus moves the file into another directory which my office computer downloads automatically.

[gircobain]

You may wanna have a look at cURL (http://curl.haxx.se) as well

[DDogg]

b0b0b0b, gircobain - Thanks for those suggestions. I'll check them out.