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Comment by loxias | Hacker News Reader

I'm probably living in my own little bubble, but I didn't know anyone used sftp for ANYTHING, at least not in the last decade.

Looking at my terminal history, scp for a single file, rsync (which you don't need to pass that --rsh flag to.. during the 21st century ;P) for anything that requires the ability to be interrupted and resume gracefully (which is most cases), and, in the rare case when I need speed above all, the "tar lzop ssh bash pipe" trick (I don't know if it has a canonical name) is correct.

Isn't this what we all do?!? If there's a better way, I don't see how, but would like to know.

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I use sftp every now and then I need to pull something and I don't know where exactly that is. A shortcut for finding the path via ssh and then pulling the file via scp, if you will.

That makes sense!

In that rare situation, I typically use tab completion to find the remote file. However, I bet that would SUCK on a high latency or low bandwidth link, where sftp would be just fine.

FWIW sftp vs scp is more about the protocol. Apparently new OpenSSH has an “scp” command that uses the sftp protocol.

But yeah Rsync is a good choice.

Note that sftp != ftps. sftp is scp. Rsync is better if you can get it, but I'm pretty sure that whenever I transfer stuff using WinSCP and File Explorer (Android) it's using sftp.

sftp still used extensively in banking, payments, transferring financial data, or datasets like student information from school districts or information on lawyers from bar associations.

Back in 1999, in one of my first professional gigs, people were still using ftp for sensitive data for automated data transfers.

Rsync+ssh would be great, but enterprise IT is slow to change.

AWS has hosted sftp backed by S3, and it's going to stick around for a while.

Sadly in 2021, ftp is still used extensively in financial services for stuff like clearing stock trades. I wish more institutions use sftp/scp for this and stop relying on allowing specific IP addresses for security.

> I didn't know anyone used sftp for ANYTHING, at least not in the last decade.

We're moving customers from FTP to SFTP. Most recent one was a well-known Fortune 500 company, which uses it to exchange some ASCII flat files with our software.

Mostly it's for XML files or PDFs.

It's simple, it works and it's easy for support to poke and prod.

You raise a good point, and I was incorrect. In my original comment I was thinking of any of us, not muggles.

Come to think of it, I once even set it up at a job in 2009. We needed to digest huge amounts of flat files from clients with little tech savvy. I put FTP on a server, put that behind OpenVPN, then sent the customers a pre-configured OpenVPN client installer. Never broke.

Tangentially, all this mention of FTP being used by banks and financial institutions is inspiring some choice nmap scans to run... ;)

Like someone else said sftp it’s huge for B2B and probably is part of how you get paid. *ftp is blunt but nice when dealing with other parties since it interoperates well, everyone has it, and (most of the time) it just works whether you are talking to a Linux box, IBM MQ, or something else altogether.

> sftp for ANYTHING

Solid Explorer (Android app) connects via sftp to Linux machines just fine. While I use Termux and rsync to do backups and bulk transfers, Solid Explorer allows me to rapidly browse remote files.

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