Welcome, Guest. [ Log In ]
Question   scp / sftp
Search KBase

Related Links:
· How do I use Telnet or SSH to access my site?
Top 5 in this Area:
1. How do I upload files (publish) to my site?
2. Can I upload files without an FTP client?
3. Commonly used FTP clients
4. I don't know what the FTP address is!
5. How do I upload to a sub-domain?
 
scp / sftp
Scp and sftp are both part of OpenSSH, the secure shell server we run. Now that all of our users can have shell access, everyone can take advantage of these secure methods of transferring files.

Do note that you cannot use sftp with an FTP only user - despite the name, sftp has fairly little in common with FTP. In other words, you must enable shell access for a user before you can use sftp (or scp) with that account. Sftp is different from SSL-FTP (which we may begin offering in the future).

Another approach would be to purchase our VPN service (available from the web panel), which will create an encrypted tunnel for *all* your connections to us (mail, ftp, etc.).

Here is some software to help you make secure file transfers to our machines. We don't officially provide support for any of this software, although many of us use it.
http://winscp.vse.cz/eng/
(For Windows; recommended by Sage)

http://www.cygwin.com/
For those who prefer a command line interface (there are also some GUI front ends that use this as a back end), I highly recommend Cygwin. Cygwin isn't just an SSH / scp / sftp client - it's an entire UNIX environment for Windows. It comes with its own terminal program, and pretty much all of the GNU development utilities you could ever want. The installer is pretty slick as well.

http://www.cuteftp.com/
CuteFTP Pro has sftp support. I don't think the free version does, though.

http://macssh.com/
For all the Mac users who are feeling left out (except OSX users who already have access to all of the stuff included in Cygwin, and much more), you already have OpenSSH. If you're running OS9, or if you don't like the command line interface, check out this link. There's an SFTP client, which is available for both OS9 and OSX here.

For some other suggestions, check out a site mentioned in our SSH article: http://freessh.org/.

Please let us know if you have positive (or negative) experiences with any of these programs, or if you discover a free and easy to use graphical client that you're happy with.

Last updated: Mar 30, 2005.
User Post (2005-07-13 14:43:51 by mir)
Note that the port is the same for SFTP as it is for SSH (port 22).
User Post (2005-10-01 08:31:50 by chui101)
SFTP is pretty resource intensive, with all the encryption and such. Does anyone know if this counts towards our cpu-minutes limit?
User Post (2005-04-26 08:31:56 by lampoon)
Mac users may want to look at this site for tunnel and sftp info:
http://www.apacheuser.com/sftp.shtml
User Post (2005-03-11 11:20:42 by macmanx)
For Macs, I HIGHLY recommend Fugu. Mac OS X's Connect to Server feature is both unstable and insecure. Fugu was built to fill that hole and won an Apple Design Award for "Best Mac OS X Use of Open Source".

"Fugu allows you to take advantage of SFTP's security without having to sacrifice the ease of use found in a GUI. Fugu also includes support for SCP file transfers, and the ability to create secure tunnels via SSH. "

http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/fugu/
User Post (2004-09-16 09:07:46 by funkatron)
http://filezilla.sourceforge.net
Filezilla is a good, free option for secure transfers on Windows.

On OS X, if you'd prefer a GUI client, try:

http://icu.unizh.ch/~dkocher/cyberduck/
Cyberduck, or
http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/fugu/
Fugu, both of which are free.

http://www.interarchy.com/
Interarchy is a very good OS X client as well with some very cool scheduling/mirroring features, but is not free.
User Post (2004-07-29 22:34:41 by kalriath)
Personally, I use WinSCP from http://winscp.sourceforge.net/eng/download.php
User Post (2004-06-21 13:00:16 by wersh)
Just for reference, Windows (command line or otherwise) does not natively have scp, sftp, or even ssh. However, I think the PuTTY ssh client comes with all three.

The man pages for scp, sftp, and ssh are quit euseful if you're on a *nix system. (Don't know what a man page is? At a command line, type "man man" and hit enter.)
User Post (2004-01-13 15:35:27 by baloneyc)
For those who are curious about using the regular *nix (and perhaps windows?) command line versions of these utils, here is a very basic intro:
<pre>scp [-r] [user@host:]sourceitem [user@host:]destinationitem</pre>
The -r option is required for copying directories. For example: "<code>scp -r Sites/example.com johnd@example.com:</code>" will copy the the directory to into your remote home directory. Note that after typing the command, you will need to enter your password for the remote site. Also note that this command can not only be used to copy between a remote site and your local box, but also between two remote hosts (and, technically, to different locations on your box).
<pre>sftp username@host[/dir]</pre>
Not much to say about this one. Once you authenticate, it works pretty much like standard ftp. Note though that you need to include your username in the command, as, unlike standard ftp, you will not be given the option of entering your username, only your password.
<p>
For more info and options, check in your local manpages. :)