First, get Transmit from Panic. I think it’s the BEST available FTP app as it’s interface rocks, it’s simple to use, and offers the features I need. I love how it can sync folder navigation between my local folders and the server folders. I also love being able to right click one or many files to get a list of URLs to those files. There are many more features too. You can find Transmit on the Mac App Store.

Once you install Transmit, it will automatically add a few Automator Actions. The one we want to use is the Synchronize. To set it up, open Automator which will be in your Applications folder. When it opens, choose to create a new Workflow. Then use the Actions filter to find Synchronize and drag to the steps on the right. Then find the Quit Application and drag it over under the Synchronize step.

Finally, enter the:

• FTP address for your server.
• Your username.
• Your password.
• Change the Sync Direction to Download!
• If you tick Delete Orphaned Destination Items, it will remove all files not on the server. We leave this unchecked because Foxtail Technology stores the backups in folders with the timestamp in the folder name. Since each backed up file’s folder name is unique, we can store daily backups of our databases!

- First get a free 2gb Dropbox account. That link will give you and us an extra 250mb of storage. You can upgrade to 50gb for $100/year or 100gb for $200/year.

- Install Dropbox and make a folder for your FileMaker Backups.

- Configure FileMaker Server to backup to your new Dropbox folder.

For basic backups, that it! This will put your FileMaker backups on the Dropbox server. For bonus points, if you install Dropbox on more than one computer, you automatically have another copy of your FileMaker backups on multiple hard drives!

Keep in mind that if you remove a file from the Dropbox folder, it will be removed from all computers syncing with Dropbox.

That said, if you have a Mac, you can add a ‘Folder Action’ to your backup folder to move any files added to the backup folder to different folder. This would give you the effect of transferring the backups from the server to another computer!

on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving added_items
   tell application “Finder”
      repeat with aFile in added_items
         tell application “Finder”
            try
               move aFile to folder “Gumby:Users:Hal:Desktop:”
               on error err
                  display dialog err
            end try
         end tell
      end repeat
   end tell
end adding folder items to