lftp – move files between different Linux remote machines quickly and reliable

It’s based on lftp linux utility, that was written by Russian programmer – Alexander Lukyanov; it is made available under the GNU General Public License.

Among its amazing features, it allows you download files in parallel. The utility is open source and freely available via yum. More about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lftp

It allows to move huge files by ftp in parallel.

Assume, we have machine A and machine B, and we want to move some heavy file from machine A to machine B.

On machine B:

[my_user_B@machine_B somedir]$ lftp -u my_user_A machine_A

Password: xxxxxxxxxxxxx

lftp my_user_A@machine_A:~> ls

drwxr-xr-x    2 222      111          4096 Jan 08 14:07 .

-rw-r—–    1 222      111      7067885260 Jan 08 14:10 some_huge_file.dmp.gz
drwx——   32 222      111          4096 Jan 08 14:40 ..

lftp my_user_A@machine_A:~> pget -n 10 some_huge_file.dmp.gz

7067885260 bytes transferred in 2471 seconds (2.73M/s)

lftp my_user_A@machine_A:~>

Transferring the same file, using traditional ftp would take much more: