Drupal as a simple file manager I'm wondering how easily it would be to achieve the following.


I want to create a Drupal site where users have a small "file area" to upload files. 
I would like to be able to take those files and upload them to another server (using FTP, HTTP posts, or XMLRPC).
It would be also nice to get the "remote server" directory listing. 


I obviously think this can be easily achieved by ftp; but can I tell to the FTP manager to use the username/password couple of the Drupal user? How can I hide those information to the end user?

What I have in mind is the implementation in Drupal of the Dropbox service, where the Drupal site would be the Dropbox provider.

Any ideas on where to get started ?
Take a look at the IMCE module.

It's a powerful upload manager that requires either CKEditor or IMCE Wysiwyg API bridge to work.

It supports per-user upload directories and space quotas, amongst other useful stuff.

As for the XML-RPC, you should take a look at the Services module.

Regardless of the path you take, you will definitely need to add some custom code and, to help with that (Drupal 7 only) take a look at the FileTransfer class. (related question)