In Fintech, the following scenario seems fairly common:
You've paid for access to a huge collection of data, but it is made available to you as thousands of little files, each with a footprint in the neighborhood of 300 kB, but altogether amounting to roughly 1 TB of data. Some of the files are stored with zip compression on the remote machine; some aren't. Furthermore, all of these files can only be accessed via FTP and you are limited to one connection to the server at a time.
What is the fastest way to get copies of these files?