The open-source FTP client FileZilla offers the option of saving connections, including passwords. If you have entered many FTP servers there, then you can take their settings to other computers. You can use PowerShell to decrypt the passwords.

FileZilla is available for Windows as an installable version or as a ZIP archive. The latter you only need to unpack, and then you can start the program immediately. In this way, a portable version of FileZilla can be set up on a removable disk. For this purpose, you have to copy the example file for fzdefaults.xml from the /docs folder into the program directory.

Settings in the user profile

Naturally, the question of taking the settings with you does not arise if you use a portable FileZilla. For the installed version, you can find the settings under Appdata\Roaming\FileZilla in the user's profile.

So, if you were to use roaming profiles in a domain, the list of connections and other settings would follow you to all PCs. Without server-based profiles or in workgroups, you can manually transfer them to another computer. To do so, copy the list of FTP servers (sitemanager.xml) as well as filezilla.xml and trustedcerts.xml for further settings.

Reading passwords

The sitemanager.xml file contains the usernames and passwords for the stored FTP servers.

FileZilla stores the connection settings in the sitemanager.xml file

FileZilla stores the connection settings in the sitemanager.xml file

These are base64-encoded and can be extracted quite easily with PowerShell.

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[xml]$fz = Get-Content $env:appdata\FileZilla\sitemanager.xml
$fz.FileZilla3.Servers.Server |
foreach{$_.Host, $_.User, [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetString( [Convert]::FromBase64String($_.Pass.'#text') ), "=====`n"}

This overview can also be used to identify weak passwords and replace them with better ones.

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