Interarchy 8.1 Review

Interarchy 8.1
Company: Stairways Software Pty

(Native to both PowerPC and Intel Macs)
When is an FTP client not just an FTP client? When it”s Interarchy. While I am not going to claim that Interarchy is the best FTP client on the planet, or even on the Mac platform (I have not tried them all) I will say I really enjoy using it almost every day.

For years, stretching back to 1995, I have been using a variety of FTP clients, usually to upload MyMac.com content. When the norm for connecting to the internet was a 56K or slower modem (Show of hands: who remembers Global Village modems?) downloading large files using a web browser was usually much slower than downloading using an FTP client. (FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, after all.) To speed up downloading these huge 1.5MB files, FTP was the way to go. And for me, for years, that meant Fetch.

Fetch has followed me from Mac to Mac over the years. It has been one of the few programs that follow me on every machine I own, or use. Now that I am using Interarchy, that will change.

First, using Interarchy is much like using Safari, in that the navigation is similar, as is the tabbed windows. It sports bookmarks and a bookmarks bar for quick and easy navigation, which again is much like a modern-day web browser. Interarchy is to intuitive that it takes almost no time to get up and running with the application, a hallmark of good (and expected) Macintosh software.

Interarchy supports all the popular file transfer protocols, including standard FTP, secure FTP (SFTP), WebDAV, Amazon S3, FTP/SSL-TLS, and even HTTP downloads. The only notable exception, one I would have loved to see, is support for Bit Torrent file transfers. Perhaps in a future version. But for the most part, Interarchy has the download protocol you need.

It also supports mirroring, so that you can work on a website from your local hard drive, making changes and the like, and then upload those changes to the “live” website. And because Interarchy sports Scheduling, you can make changes, and it will upload to the site the next time the schedule allows. Handy. Scheduling is also good for downloading content. If you know that your local network is always busy at a certain time of day, you can schedule a large file to be downloaded at a time when network congestion is less.

There is on really cool feature Interarchy has many people may not care about, but I do. It is called Packet Sniffing, and it allows me to see all network traffic on my local area network, over Ethernet or Airport. Why do I like this? I can quickly see if some rascally neighbor is ridding on my Airport network and downloading a bunch of files. Usually they only use it to browse the internet, not hogging much bandwidth, so I let it go.

For the most part, I use Interarchy for uploading our two weekly podcasts from my office computer to our webserver at Inno-Tech.com. For such a simple task, Interarchy does not even break a sweat. I have also used it to download our entire website to my local machine, which was an all night task. This way, I could work on the site offline, make changes at will, and quickly see if what I was doing would cause any problems. (They usually do!)

Fantastic software. I love it, and it has completely replaced Fetch for me. While my FTP needs are meager, Interarchy is the real deal for those with much more demanding needs. For me, it is like using a fighter plane to get to my parents house ten miles away: way more power and functionality than I usually have need of. But it is nice to have it at your fingertips when you really have need of it.

Find out all the features Interarchy supports here

MyMac.com Rating: 4.5 out of 5

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