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This is one possibility. The other is that your FTP server doesn't support the passive transfer mode, but requires active transfers instead. This is a feature to be added in the next release of JoomlaPack Remote.

Another possibility is that your server requires an encrypted connection, i.e. SFTP or FTPS. Right now, Remote doesn't support these connection options. I am working towards that, but other features have higher priority.

The best test is to use an FTP client application, e.g. FileZilla, connect to your site's FTP server immediately after the backup is over and try to download the file manually. If the file isn't there, but appears in a few minutes, it's the lag problem NeroInferno described. This will also be addressed in the next Remote release, by adding a "lead time to download" option. If the file is there, but you had to use the Active mode to download it, it's the problem I described above. So far I have witnessed this problem on a very limited number of hosts.

Since we advise people against using a publicly accessible directory as the backup output folder, the direct link wouldn't work. It would also beat the purpose of Remote, which is to automatically download the file.

Another idea would be to have Remote check if the file exists. If it doesn't, wait 30 seconds. Then retry and keep doing that for a maximum of X minutes, where X is a user-configurable value.

Does this sound like a better idea? I basically need your help here, because I have no idea if the amount of time between the backup and the file appearing on FTP is constant or variable.

That's an interesting finding! I was unaware that there is a file name length limit in FTP. I used to bump on this at archive creation time when I had a long path perpended to the file name, e.g. /var/www/vhosts/mylongdomainname.com/administrator/components/com_joomlapack/backup, that's why the [RANDOM] tag wasn't included in the default backup name string.

I guess there must be something similar with FTP. I think I'll have to read the RFC...