You can connect to a remote machine over FTP to download all of its contents, for example to migrate a website or retrieve a backup to your VPS.

To do so we use **lftp** and its **mirror** command, which recursively replicates the remote content into a local directory.

:::info
If you do not have `lftp` installed: `apt install lftp -y` (Debian/Ubuntu) or `yum install lftp -y` (RHEL/CentOS).
:::

This is the script (replace the host, login, password and destination values with your own):

```bash
#!/bin/bash
export PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/root/bin"

FTP_HOST='Remote.Server.IP'
FTP_USER='Login'
FTP_PASS='Pass'

BackupDestination='/home/backup'

lftp -e "set ftp:ssl-allow no" << EOF
open ${FTP_HOST}
user ${FTP_USER} ${FTP_PASS}
mirror -e . ${BackupDestination}
bye
EOF
```

Notes:

- `mirror -e` deletes files in the destination that no longer exist at the source (exact mirror). Remove the `-e` flag if you prefer to keep what has already been downloaded.
- `set ftp:ssl-allow no` disables TLS; remove it if the remote server supports FTPS so the transfer is encrypted.
- You can save the script (e.g. `import-ftp.sh`), make it executable with `chmod +x import-ftp.sh` and run it inside `screen` or `tmux` if the download will take a while.