Here’s the deal — I’ve got something like 6600 (13 gigs) of digital photos that I’ve taken over the years. These are wonderfully organized in a directory structure with 177 folders (i.e. an average of 37 files per folder). I say all of this because I don’t think there is any part of this that is unmanageable.
Yet, I’m not at all pleased with any of the Mac OS X SFTP or SCP clients and their ability, or lack there of, to synchronize this structure across my LAN in a reasonable amount of time. WinSCP, a wonderful bit of freeware that only runs on Windows, can synch this tree over a pathetic Wireless-G network in about 20 seconds flat (not counting file transfers after the synch is finished). Why is it so hard to get this same performance from a G4 Power Mac operating on a wired LAN? To date, these are all the clients I’ve tried:
CyberDuck, (2.7.3): Freeware. Was completely incapable of finishing a synchronization. After getting through the directory tree, it would just disconnect without transferring files and without giving any reason for aborting. Upon reviewing the user forums, I found this was preferable to the crashes that many others were getting. When manually transferring files via SFTP, it was getting a lousy 600KB/s (command line SFTP gets about over 10x that). Basically, not ready for prime time.
Fetch (5.2): Trial-ware, $25. This is what all the Mac heads rave about. When tasked with synching my tree (actually, “mirror” is the term it uses), it gave a file-by-file status update at a rate of maybe 2 files per second. Sure, I’ll just hang out and wait for an HOUR while Fetch gawks at each file’s time stamp for a half-billion CPU cycles. What a joke.
rBrowser (4.4.1): Trial-ware, $35. So far, this is showing some hope of being only mostly intolerable. It’s a whopping 3 times faster than Fetch since it only takes 20 minutes to synch the tree, which, for comparisons sake is 60x longer than WinSCP. The synchronization dialog box is rather cumbersome, but, at least it saves past operations to make them easy to repeat. Not willing to actually fork over any money for this just yet.
Another also-ran is Fugo (1.2): Freeware. Although, this one technically does not qualify because it is simply a GUI front-end to SFTP, and therefore, does not support directory tree synchronization. However, I will point out, that it has a very nice UI and I think I will find myself using it in the future for simple file transfers that I otherwise would have gone to the command line to perform.
Update: osXigen (2.6): Trial-ware, $20. At first I was confused by the interface for its total lack of helpful information on how to synch 2 directories. There’s a simple button on the bottom that enables synch mode. When enabled, you simply drag and drop the folder to/from the Finder and it takes over from there. In the preferences, there’s a setting to delete extraneous destination files or not. Very minimalist — to a flaw. For example, there’s no way to do a “dry run” where you can find out what files you might be deleting if you were to continue with the synch operation. The good news is that it does do the synch of my tree just fine. Woops, just as soon as I typed that, it crashed. Ha ha. The other bad news is that it suffers from terrible SFTP transfer bandwidth — about 1/10 of what command line SFTP does.
Fetch (5.2.1): Trial-ware, $25. I see they made a performance update/fix in this version, so, I thought I’d try it out to see if it makes any difference. Good news — it is indeed faster. It now completes the synch in just under 10 minutes and the transfer bandwidth is right up where it should be compared to command line tools. Now, if only they had a mirror “dry run” so that it would be possible to see what files are going to be added/deleted. I may begrudgingly cough up some money to keep using this.
Then again, I may just write a perl script to do the synch with command line tools…
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