FTP’s been around for nearly 40 years and I don’t foresee that it would disappear any time soon. Thousands of organizations are still using FTP on a daily basis for a variety of tasks including offsite backups, file sharing and B2B integrations.
Optitask is a great tool to use if you need automated FTP operations in your business.
Let me show you how to automate a simple FTP process. I have a web site with a Microsoft SQL Express database that I want to download on a daily basis to my local computer for backup purposes.
The first step is to create a new task for the backup:
Next, I’ll use a FTP Connect component as the first action in my task to establish a connection with the FTP Server. On the settings page of the FTP Connect component I specify the connection settings to my FTP server:
Screen Notes: I’ve selected the FTP server type of FTP. Optitask currently supports standard FTP, FTPS and FTP over SSL. SFTP will also be added in the next release. You’ll notice that I also specified the default remote directory after the connection is established.
In the Advanced Settings page for the connection component I’ll update the Connection and Read Timeouts to bigger values since I know my connection to the server is slow and timeouts are inevitable:
Next, we’ll add a FTP Download action that will download our files from the FTP server:
Screen Notes: You’ll see from the screenshot above I’ve selected the FTP Connection we just created. This is because Optitask allows you to use multiple FTP sessions in the same task at once. I also selected the “Multiple files matching pattern” that will download all the files matching my search pattern automatically.
After the files are downloaded, we need to disconnect from the FTP server and we do this by adding a FTP Disconnect action below our download action:
The last step is to setup a schedule for our task. We’ll add a schedule trigger to the task and specify the settings to execute our backup task every night at 12AM:
That’s it. Four simple steps to automate file transfers from a FTP server.
