Upload from URL: Send Web Files Straight to Cloud or FTP

You find a useful file on the web — a release build, a dataset, a big PDF, an installer. You want it in your Google Drive or on your FTP server, not on your laptop. Normally that means saving it to your Downloads folder and then re-uploading it, which wastes disk space and takes twice as long. FTPie’s Upload from URL skips the detour: paste the URL, pick a destination, and the file streams straight into that storage.

How it works

1. Right-click inside any folder → Upload from URL (or use the New → Upload From URL menu)
2. Paste one URL, or paste several (one per line) to queue multiple uploads
3. FTPie fetches metadata first — file name, size, content type — so you can verify the file before committing
4. Pick the destination folder on any connected storage
5. The transfer runs through FTPie like a pipe — bytes flow from the URL straight into the destination with no local save step

“I needed to archive fifty release builds from a vendor’s CDN into our SFTP server. Pasted all the URLs at once, closed the laptop lid, came back to a finished queue.”

Why this matters

Bandwidth, honestly

Worth being clear on one thing. Most cloud providers don’t offer a true server-to-server “fetch this URL for me” API — so the bytes do pass through FTPie on your machine as they move from the source URL to the destination storage. Your network bandwidth is still used. The saving is on disk, not on bandwidth: you don’t pay the cost of writing to a local file and then reading it back up.

For FTP/SFTP destinations that’s the only way this could work anyway. For cloud destinations, the net effect is the same as downloading and re-uploading — just without the disk round-trip.

Monitoring and managing uploads

Every URL upload lands in FTPie’s regular transfer manager, so you get the same:

• Real-time progress per file
• Pause, resume, cancel individual uploads
• Automatic retries with configurable strategy
• Full queue view when batching multiple URLs

Where it fits

Upload from URL is the clean way to get web files to where they actually belong. It pairs naturally with Auto Backups (archive downloads into a versioned backup destination), integrated compression (zip a batch once it lands), and the rest of FTPie’s cross-storage toolkit.