FTP: How to download all files, directories and sub-directories

I’ve recently decided to cancel my hosting package with 1and1, as I don’t really have much use for it any more what with all the freebies Google is dishing out.

I needed to take a backup of all my files, and unfortunately mget doesn’t (or at least at the time) doesn’t support the downloading of directories, luckily there is another tool to help, wget.

This example of wget will download all files (the -r specifies recursively) from a directory on the domain

wget -r ftp://account\_name:password@mydomain.com/directoryname