You are welcome. If you have SSH access to hosting be sure to check my post about pre-compressed backups with WinSCP (link couple comments above). It is much faster for large amount of files.

Same here, I spent like half an hour trying to filter the keywords I was using, till I got to this blog post. I need to backup my hosting account files and was lloking for the same thing, a backup software that would use FTP also as a source, not only a destination.

Thank you very much, I’ll give this software a try.

Yep, I remember this not being widely covered when I researched the topic. :)

Note that this doesn’t scale well for large quantities of files (hundreds/thousands). As number of images in site grew over time backups became unreasonably long.

I had since moved to scripted SSH backup routine with WinSCP, that compresses site’s content into single archive and it gets downloaded much faster.

I still use Cobian for this myself, so have no beter offer. At least for now. :) Problem with FTP it is much less convenient for determining file differences and such. Protocol was designed for download and upload, not complex file system iterations.

If there are only specific files that get changed you can try filtering, I hadn’t used that option much personally.

To keep things clean I do following – archive option (files get compressed into single zip with date) and set number of Full copies to keep at four. With weekly backup this setup retains backups for last month and automatically deletes older ones.

I was also very interested by its ability to backup remote data (FTP source). I tried this feature today and was a little bit disapointted by the fact that when you backup remote FTP sources, Cobian Backup can only do FULL backup. This means that it downloads all files every time, which in my case where there are very few files that changes from one time to another, makes it not so efficient.

Not to mention that is also creates a new directory for each backup (FTP source), meaning that after a few backups, I end up with several copies of my remote source. I then have to do manual cleanup, unless I miss some cool setup option in Cobian.

Do you have any other free and reliable solution to suggest for backuping remote FTP source in a more incremental way?

Thanks for your great blog,

–Mikael