Have you ever encountered the problem to backup a complex webspace, only accessible via ftp? No chance to tar or rsync? Then you need a good ftp client capable of doing a recursive download of the site, optimally able to mirror source and destination.

The best ftp client I have found so far: lftp

Alternatives: ncftp, ncftpget, wget

lftp in action:

lftp -u user,password -e "mirror --delete --only-newer -v --log sync.log -a /htdocs/ /www/domain/www/htdocs" www.domain.tld

This will download the complete docroot of the webspace account, doing a mirror with (priviously) dowloadete parts of that webspace.

lftp -u user,password -e "mirror --reverse --delete --only-newer -v --log sync.log -a /htdocs/ /www/domain/www/htdocs" www.domain.tld

This will upload a complete site

lftp is able to do much more - see the manpage for details!