Page History

Overview

SFTP is a secure file transfer protocol sending data over encripted SSH transport. One should notice that it's a single-stream protocol. It can also be significantly slower than bbcp or Globus Online due to its internal data encription. The protocol doesn't seem to be optimized for transferring data over a Wide Area Network (WAN).

Note that there is a similar protocol called SCP. In terms of its performance it has no difference from SFTP as they're both based on SSH. 

The main benefit of sftp (or scp) is that it's very easy to use.

Usage examples

Here is a basic example of an interactive session (a password for SLAC UNIX user 'user' is being requested):

% sftp user@psexport.slac.stanford.edu:/usr/work/user/MyDataFile.dat ./
Connecting to psexport01.slac.stanford.edu...
user@psexport01.slac.stanford.edu's password:
Fetching /usr/work/user/MyDataFile.dat to ./MyDataFile.dat
...

The command can also be used in the batch mode. See UNIX man pages for further detail.