OK, so I was looking for a cheap (preferably free) solution to automatically backup my whole website to my computer at scheduled intervals.  I've tried a couple of possible solutions and have finally arrived at one that I'm comfortable with. 

1. I'm currently using FileZilla as my FTP client and searched for command line instructions.  I found a couple and it seems as if it might work.  The only problem I found, was that the latest version did not support command line instructions and so I abandoned FileZilla as an option.

2. Next I tried to use Microsoft's command line FTP tool.  I could log in and move around, and could download all the files in a directory with the mget command, but I could not get it to recursively download the whole site with all its sub-directories.

3. I searched the Internet for tools, and found a couple, but none of them were free.

4. I then remenbered that I've used Microsoft's SyncToy at one stage to sync two directories on my PC automatically.  It worked like a charm and was free.  I wondered if it could handle FTP.  So I searched the Net and quickly found that it was not FTP ready.  I did however stumble upon an article where some dude compared SyncToy with SyncBack.

5. SyncBack is a free tool that allows you to sync two file locations - and one of them can be an FTP destination.  GREAT.  The interface is a bit clumsy and takes a while to get used to.  The only drawback is that you can only enter an FTP site as a destination, but luckily you can configure SyncBack to "restore" files.  So I've entered my PC location as the source and my FTP location as the destination and then automatically "restore" files from the destination (FTP) to the source (PC).  The advanced options thus allows you to "reverse" the procedures so you can still accomplish a full FTP download of your whole site.  SynBack even brings up Microsoft Scheduler after you have entered all your options to enable you to set up regular, automatic syncs.  Other drawback - it does take a while to run through all my files and it does not zip the files before downloading them.

6. I'll stick with SyncBack for now, as you can set it up to only update changes.  The first run took very long, but every subsequent run will only update/delete files to reflect file changes on my web server.

And as I've set up automatic Cron jobs to backup my MySQL databases onto my file server, I'm quite comfortable with the setup I have.  All that remains now is to test it...  Feel free to contact me at: cobus DOT taljaard AT gmail DOT com