Home Network - Home FTP Server and/or Windows Network

It all started with me wanting to have a backup for my podcasts. My iTunes folder in ThinkPad was growing in excess of 20GB and I was in no mood to get rid of my podcasts and photo albums. I treasure them. I contemplated on getting an external hard disk but then toyed with a different option. There was lot of space (~250 GB) sitting around on my second laptop and obviously I'd want to use that. But I wanted that space to be a live drive accessible on my ThinkPad. And that's when my networking instincts took over me. And I should admit I almost made big weather out of it.

I was rather lazy to go with the least effective yet the most direct method of transferring files using an USB drive. It is a pain to transfer files (podcasts and pictures in my case) on a regular basis to the archive on the other computer. It was then I tried out the networking features in the 'highly acclaimed' Vista. It was not bad after all. The only catch is to turn the Network Discovery and File Sharing ON (Link opens in a new page). My other laptop was completely accessible and I could transfer all I wanted. There was still something missing. Speed.

Transferring multiple files in the background isn't a big deal especially with these dual cores but, choosing the folders and locations all the time is again a pain. That's when FTP came handy. I shortlisted some FTP servers from Sourceforge. FileZilla, Serv-U, WinFTP and CrossFTP were among the best I found. FileZilla is easily the best in the pack (and free) but for some reason, I was not able to get it working with a FileZilla client. The server was working fine but due to router and firewall issues, FileZilla client wasn't able to connect to the server. Serv-U and CrossFTP are free as well. CrossFTP is web-based application and is pretty good. For some reason I wasn't convinced entirely to have my files transferred through a web application. I used WinFTP for sometime. It is not free and that's the only bad part. The features are extremely good. I used it for 30 days and then was locked out of the interface. I have since used Serv-U. It is a pretty decent application with no features comprised. It is free in the sense after the trial period, only single user connection can be enabled which works for me. So, this home FTP setup worked best for me. And I chose to go with FileZilla client. Among its positives, simplicity stands out. I use SmartFTP and WinSCP at work and so, wasn't tempted to use those.

In the end, having a home FTP server setup made things really easy for me. Easy to keep my files organized and made my archiving process lot more efficient. I found these two links at Lifehacker very useful. Link 1: Serv-U. Link 2: FileZilla.