Using Wget With FTP To Download/Move Web Sites Recursively

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme <ft [at] falkotimme [dot] com>
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Last edited 10/22/2012

Sometimes you need to move a web site from one server to another. Instead of downloading the web site from the old server to your PC via FTP and uploading it from your PC to the new server, it would save a lot of time to simply copy the web site from one server to the other. This tutorial explains how to use Wget to download/move a web site from one server to the other via FTP.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

I'm assuming that you have a working FTP login on the remote server.

2 Using Wget

To download a remote web site to your local server recursively, you can use Wget as follows:

wget -m ftp://username:password@www.mydomain.tld/

The -m switch enables mirroring, which means it enables recursion with infinite recursion depth, and it keeps FTP directory listings as well as time stamps.

If you just want to download a specific subdirectory, e.g. /htdocs, you'd do it as follows:

wget -m ftp://username:password@www.mydomain.tld/htdocs

3 Links

• Wget: http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/