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.