Compressing and extracting folders via FileZilla

I want to rar and extract folder(of my wordpress site) in the host machine using FileZilla ? Is it possible with FileZilla ? If not what you will suggest ? I dont have SSH access.

The wording of your question is not clear, so I am assuming you want the the files transferred to and from your wordpress site to be compressed.

It looks like there is not a standard FTP compression algorithm ("Unfortunately, there is no one standard FTP file compression method; there are HUNDREDS"). You could contact wpengine.com to see if their FTP server supports a compression algorithm, but I would not get my hopes up.

When you use a company like wpengine.com you get the advantage of a syestem which is low cost, easy to use, and easy to maintain, but lose the ability to run custom code. As a result you options are limited to the features and tools they provide. If their FTP server supports compression then you could get a compatable client and use the compression in the site. If you can run custom code on their server then you could get a program which would do the rar compression/extraction for you. Otherwise you will have to upload/download the full size files.

If you need an easy way to transfer files between computers there are many services specifically for this.

As a side note, the FileZilla FTP server does support compression but it looks like you would need the ability to configure the server (which is not possible with most hosts). This can be found in the FileZilla Server Interface under Edit > Filetransfer compresssion.

FileZilla cannot do this. It only allows you to execute FTP command (even with SFTP, which uses SSH).

There are two options:

• There is some kind of WPEngine.com specific interface that lets you do this.

• You need some kind of remote desktop or shell access (SSH, VNC, etc.) that allows you to execute custom commands.

If none of the above applies, you cannot rar files.

All computers (including smart phones) may use ssh.

On Windows you may transfer files with WinSCP, which works a little like the Windows File Explorer (or Norton Commander if you're old enough to have known that).

You could use putty to uncompress on the host but it's simpler to simply transfer your folder and let WinSCP handle all the file copies.

Of course you'll need a login and a password.

If I didn't understand and it's the server that doesn't offer ssh, why not simply send the uncompressed folder with filezilla ? Filezilla is good at that.

If you want to use Filezilla, then you need to zip it. Most likely, your server supports at least zip/unzip of zip files. It may not support rar files. It probably supports tar as well, so you could create a tar.gz. It really depends on what types your server knows already (since you don't have root access to install anything different).

I have an old Quick Unzipper script on GitHub, it can unzip the file on the server. Just place the unzipper in the same directory as the zip file, go to the file on the webpage, and click unzip. Even that process seems better than transferring all the files. Note that my script uses PHP to do the unzipping with the ZipArchive class. It works on most hosts. If you want to use another type like bzip or gzip, you could whip up your own version of my unzipper script to support that type.

Even if you zipped the file, it's total file size will not be that much smaller. To get the smallest size possible, zip would not be what you want. If your needing this to speed up the transfer time, then even a barely compressed zip file would transfer faster than the individual files via ftp.

When you transfer thousands of files with FTP, it has to handle each file 1 by 1 (though you do say 5 files at a time, its still processing per file basis). It has to make the directory, switch into it, all commands that take time. When you transfer just 1 large file, you don't have all the extra overhead that FTP normally has.