February 24, 2004
Faster copycat.
On a reasonably regular basis, I perform a complete backup of the entire veer.com web site (all of the html and image components anyway) to a dated archive. I have been doing this since the site was launched in July of 2002. I danced a similar jig while working on the EyeWire web site as well. This behaviour is driven not only by paranoia of losing something I have worked on, but by an equally indeterminate urge to save the ephemeral — even something as transient as a web site in a given state on a given day. Yes, it’s an illness. But, it’s also my own little Internet Archive Wayback Machine stored in cozy StuffIt archives right on my desktop. Part of the challenge of making these backup copies is that it must be done via FTP. As the site gets larger and wider and deeper, I have found the GUI-based FTP clients such as Fetch and Transmit timeout and disconnect more and more as the site increases in complexity. This could be because the clients have to traverse an ever-growing directory structure, and it takes time to switch back and forth between folders and then update the status for the user. You’ve heard me rant about this before… graphical applications are slugs under OS X when compared to similar software running in OS 9. Likewise, some of the network connection issues are probably related to goofy firewall we have in place between our desktops and the server, but I’m not about to get into that right now. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of Fetch and the perpetual handy-dandiness that the Panic boys crank out. But the reality of the situation is that FTPing vast amounts of data from a voluminous hierarchy of directories is just plain faster via the command line. Period. That being said, I would like to thank the bountiful smartness of Waferbaby for pointing out the suite of NcFTP tools. Slick recursive copying of an entire top-level directory is now so easy and interruption-free, I can hardly stand it. This small open-source download beats the digital pants off the weak FTP functionality built into OS X and will save me hours over the next several months. No kidding.
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