I have a backup log that I create every night…on three different servers. They are all separated by many miles across the Internet. I wanted to find an easy way to send them all to one central location, but at the same time I did not want to have any extra software to do it.

The key requirement of not needing additional software meant that I would need to script FTP in some way.

After playing around with it at the command line, I discovered the -s option. It allows you to feed it a file that it will use to play back ftp commands.

Lets look at what I need to do to send this file

1. Connect to the host (ftp.somesite.com)

2. Send the username and password (administrator/Password1997)

3. Send the file (c:\logs\backups.log)

4. Disconnect

In FTP commands this converts to:

open ftp.somesite.com
administrator
Password1997
bin
put c:\Logs\Backup.log
quit

the bin command makes sure that ftp does not try to do any text conversions with the file.

Save the script to a file (In my case I called it FtpScript.txt)

Now if we call it at the command line it will automatically upload the file

(ftp -s:FtpScript.txt)

Now I can schedule it to run every night, and the backup logs are uploaded automatically.

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