Software FTP advice!

[Spacethingy]

OK, so here's the picture:

I'd like to have my files on both my home computer and the networked computers at my college, synced together (I don't like memory sticks... :lol.

I found Dropbox, hooray! Just what I wanted! Nice and easy automatic syncing, all I had to do was remember to start the portable Dropbox.exe on the college PC each time I logged on. Then, the college ungraded to Windows7 (bye-bye portable Dropbox) and installed a hyper-active proxy (that blocked out Dropbox.com).

Then I stumbled on...

...yep, XKCD is awesome for learning about computers... ahem, anyway...

I vaguely get that FTP is used to transfer files across the net (as in File Transfer Protocol), and I noticed that there are FTP programs like Filezilla on Portable Apps...

What else do I need to get started? What's an FTP server?

EDIT: Bless 'em, they've just unblocked Dropbox! :woohoo: I'm still interested in FTP though...

 

[SiberianTiger]

You can use it if your hosting allows incoming connections on TCP port 25.

 

[RisingFury]

You need an FTP client and access to the server. I won't complicate matters anymore.

I use CoreFTP for my client. Basically it asks me to input the server's IP, my username and password, however, if someone is offering your a public assess, that works too. Only IP will be required. If you don't know the IP, you can use the web address too (www.myftpserver.com for example).

You connect, then all you need to do is shuffle files around, kinda like you do in Windows / Linux. CoreFTP uses a graphical interface. Left window is usually your computer, right window is the server. You just grab a file from one window and dump it into the other.

 

[agentgonzo]

No-one really uses FTP much anymore because it's unencrypted. SCP is used more often these days.

 

[garyw]

You can use it if your hosting allows incoming connections on TCP port 25.

25 is SMTP. FTP is 20 and 21.

As Agentgonzo points out SCP is better to be used and what I would recommend is that the port on the server is changed from 22 to 80 as thats guarenteed to be open.

Now you just have to hope that the proxy doesn't inspect packet headers and reject non http traffic on port 80....