I genuinely courious to know, why has this very old and established protocol lost over cloud solutions like Nextcloud (or even Google Drive)?
note: the question is for both FTPs or sFTP
You are comparing apples to bean and cheese burritos here.
FTP/FTPS/SFTP aren’t even close to the same thing as a fully integrated cloud solution. Sure you can use both things to simply transfer files between several devices, but that’s not
whythe only reason most people use a cloud solution.It is conceivable that there could be a cloud solution which might incorporate the use of SFTP/FTPS as an underlying protocol, but I think the go to is HTTPS for myriad reasons.
NOTE: if you are regularly using one of the FTP-like tools to sync files as part of your regular workflow, you should look into
rsyncNextcloud does a fair bit more than those things, no?
“with an nice client?”
You gave the answer to yourself. There aren’t any user friendly multi-platform clients with synchronization / conflict resolution / versioning.
that is what I’m going to, besides interfaces from the 90s, what else is missing?
Like 700 features which Nextcloud has.
Document editing, photo storage, sorting, and ai tagging, sharing, chat functions, maps, email, music, document sharing, etc.
They aren’t even near to the same thing. It’s like asking “why do you have that smartphone when you can use your Motorola brick phone? They both take mobile phone calls, one just has an interface from the 90s”
I mean it all depends on what you are using it for. Would I use it to simply transfer file from point A to point B? No, that’s what SFTP is for.
Would I use it to keep files in sync regardless of if I updated it on Point A or Point B? Heck yea! Could you do that via FTP? Maybe but it’d be manual and easy to screw up.
Would I use next cloud to share a directory with a friend? Yep! Couldn’t do it with SFTP? Probably but setting up a user and permissions is kind of a pain. And if I’m going to be sharing out single files all the time with tons of randoms, SFTP just isn’t going to cut it.
Would I use next could for versioning? Probably as long as it’s not code (I’d use git for code). Could you do that with FTP? Not really, not unless you did v1, etc in your files names etc. And at that point, you just must really hate nextcloud.
That’s just a few examples. Theres a ton more based on use cases. And in most of them you could probably find a solution using just SFTP. But it’ll probably be a lot more work than just using a more appropriate tool.
Synchronisation and versions control is the key
This reminds me of a somewhat famous top comment on the Hacker News announcement of Dropbox.
The “throw away your thumbdrive” part??
I don’t think you get what FTP is and isn’t. FTP and the actually secure flavors of it are just the protocol used to move the files back and forth. Nextcloud, Google Cloud, DropBox, etc do a lot of other things on top of the protocol they use to move files. If you can find an FTP client that does all of the version control, conflict resolution, automation, etc that you get from Nextcloud and others then by all means use it if you want. But there is a reason that is almost non-existent while NextCloud and other programs actually do that stuff.
I actually used to use SFTP to move files back and forth between my laptop and desktop back in the day. Other and better tools have taken the place of it.
Nextcloud does calendar, contacts, photo management, maps, phone tracker, music player, forms (like google forms), todo lists, news aggregator (RSS), integration with Jitsi for web conferencing.
In the main page I can see the weather, Github notifications, reddit notifications, Mastodon notifications, Twitter notifications.
I can share a single file with a link, permanently or with a expiry date for logged-in users or publicly.
There is also hundreds more things nextcloud do but mine is configured this way. There is an app store inside it for gods sake! You can even install Solitaire…
Wake me up when FTP does half of that.
As for FTP, it’s often blocked by ISPs, slow, and the best client for it looks like it came from the 90s.
does calendar, contacts, photo management, maps, phone tracker, music player, forms (like google forms), todo lists, news aggregator (RSS), integration with Jitsi for web conferencing.
And for all of those things, my desktop and my phone have specialized applications which work better than Nextcloud in every way and do not add a huge attack vector to my personal infrastructure.
SFTP may not be the right tool for the job here, but with something like Syncthing it is infinitely easier to synchronize the data between the devices and the specialized apps work directly on the data, than forcing all different types of data through the same single type of application. There is no such thing as “dumb clients” anymore, why not leverage that?
In my opinion, they do different things.
SFTP/SCP are great ways of transferring files between computers. I prefer rsync for most things because it can resume transfers and checksum results. I’d never use FTPS because SFTP/SCP comes with SSH, and why run a separate service? SSHFS is another way to use SSH to transfer files (it mounts a remote file system to your local computer so you can use all your normal file management tools).
NextCloud (and similar) do a bunch of additional things:
- Provides clients which sync files to your local computer
- Provides a web interface for managing files
- Provides ways to share files without creating accounts
- Allows connecting external storage (eg. S3)
- Provides encryption
- And a lot more
If SFTP does everything you need, that’s awesome. Use it. :-)
Thanks for your answer, answers my question perfectly!
The reason for downvotes is comparing apple and oranges, and also throwing FTP in the mix!
Let’s consider SFTP and nextcloud. SFTP is a secure respected protocol for file transfer. If you use key authentication and disable the password authentication, it approaches to be bulletproof security wise. SSH has rarely had a vulnerability that would allow attackers in. It’s even have post quantum cryptography. It’s rather easy to set up. But it doesn’t do more than file transfer. It also doesn’t have a lot of GUI apps.
Nextcloud is like Dropbox. You can find A LOT of things in it (though frankly the quality of most of them may be low). File transfer is just one of the things that it does. It uses https, why? Because the web technologies and developers have focused on this versatile protocol in the past decades. You access internet through port 443 not 22!
If I want to backup data or transfer files, I use SFTP. Over the internet, I trust SFTP not nextcloud. For other things, I use other tools such as Synchting, nextcloud etc. Synchting allows syncing over SSH.
Ok then. Just curl every webpage and browse the web like that. Don’t use a browser.
In the end it’s just an interface difference no?
