FTP Drive is an
installable file system
The Installable File System (IFS) is a filesystem API in MS-DOS/PC DOS 4.x, IBM OS/2 and Microsoft Windows that enables the operating system to recognize and load drivers for file systems.
History
When IBM and Microsoft were co-developing OS/ ...
and
network redirector
In DOS and Windows, a network redirector, or redirector, is an operating system driver that sends data to and receives data from a remote device. A network redirector provides mechanisms to locate, open, read, write, and delete files and submit p ...
for NT-based
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
operating systems. This program is a
File Transfer Protocol
The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and data ...
(FTP)
client
Client(s) or The Client may refer to:
* Client (business)
* Client (computing), hardware or software that accesses a remote service on another computer
* Customer or client, a recipient of goods or services in return for monetary or other valuable ...
whose functionality can be accessed from any
file manager
A file manager or file browser is a computer program that provides a user interface to manage files and folders. The most common operations performed on files or groups of files include creating, opening (e.g. viewing, playing, editing or pr ...
in an OS. FTP
servers have to be configured in a special applet and appear in Windows explorer (or any other file manager) as subdirectories of a (virtual) network drive (the
drive letter
In computer data storage, drive letter assignment is the process of assigning alphabetical identifiers to volume (computing), volumes. Unlike the concept of Unix filesystem, UNIX mount points, where volumes are named and located arbitrarily in a ...
also can be configured). As of October 28, 2007, this program is
freeware
Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the f ...
.
Read-only file access can be completely transparent to applications, as long as they do not use very large
memory-mapped file
A memory-mapped file is a segment of virtual memory that has been assigned a direct byte-for-byte correlation with some portion of a file or file-like resource. This resource is typically a file that is physically present on disk, but can also b ...
s. Random write access is not possible due to limitations of the protocol. It is possible to copy files to a server, and programs which write files sequentially, as one operation, should not have problems with write access. This program has some support for
FTP over SSL and TLS.
It is reported to be incompatible with 64 bit Windows systems.
References
External links
Official websitesourceforge
FTP clients
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