wget as rsync/server migration tool

It works surprisingly well. I moved a site off a crappy server (so crappy, in fact, that core dumps were winding up in my public_html directory! Lame-o.) that wouldn’t let me have SSH access this evening to one that did, and tried for a while to get my head around *nix ftp‘s recursive get… then gave up, because whatever’s documented out there obviously wasn’t working for me.

Then I remembered wget (which I use all the time for grabbing big files, because I can just background the process and not think about it til I wonder “Hey, where’d this several-GB file on my desktop come from?”) had FTP capabilities and could spider websites. Recursive get shouldn’t be a problem!

And it wasn’t.

Just use wget -r ftp://login:password@example.org/public_html/ (or similar) and the server you’re on will happily leech from an older one! Good stuff.