Lounge

Art, Someone once referred me to a command WGET. I use it because it has a mirroring option to only download the files that have been changed recently. I've never downloaded over 1 gigs in 1 go, but this command at least has the advantage that it skips files which have already been downloaded, so if things go wrong, you can at least repeat the process. There is a windows version of WGET. WGET is a unix console command so it takes a little to understand all the options. I've entered the following commands in a notepad document:

 
wget -o log.txt -np -m ftp://username:password@www.olvrode.be/private/moodledata 

and saved it with extension .cmd Now whenever I click on this file all the recently changed files are downloaded to my pc I believe it could work for you to if you just replace the location, username and password stuff. Another thought: if you have shell access you could zip directories before downloading them.

Hi Art,
    I do use Filezilla also!. It's a great program.

There is a  queue  mode, you can set to download only modified files, or files newer than existing ones (just as the wget command, also a good option). You  can "resume" a broken queue.

Perhaps disconnecting is not due to filezilla. Go to Options and make sure you have enabled teh "keep alive" feature. You may try to increase timeout time to a couple of minutes, and set automatic reconnect, in addition.

- Enrique -

Art, I haven't used FileZilla. Enrique said that it has a feature to resume a broken download queue, but couldn't find a mention of this from FileZilla documentation.

I don't think the keep alive -feature helps here, but doesn't hurt to try. It's designed to not to disconnect when idling, downloading lot's of stuff sends messages to the ftp server "all the time".

Of the ftp programs I like FlashFXP the most. It's not free, but there is a 30-day fully working trial. It also has a download queue feature, and it reconnects and resumes the downloads if the connection is disconnected. You can set it to reconnect X times, waiting N minutes between the tries. You can also queue stuff from multiple different servers.

The wget solution might not work for you if you don't have the bulk of the files already.

Another thing that I do when downloading tons and tons of files is just to download them one folder at a time, it wears the "butt muscles" but doesn't break the connection so often.