Is FTP and SFTP connection same

Question

The developer who setup this is no longer working with us now. I' am trying to connect to my server through SFTP Example: sftp://127.0.0.1, it doesn't connect. But when I use ftp:// as my host then it connects. My server has SSL.

Just wanted to know if I use FTP and my Server has SSL will the connection be same secured as SFTP?

More Information: It used to work before with sftp://127.0.0.1

Answer 1

They are two different things.

FTP is a non-secure file transfer protocol. That your server "has SSL" (I assume you mean https) doesn't affect the FTP server at all.

SFTP is a protocol based on SSH. If your server has an SSH server installed, you should be able to use SFTP.

From man sftp:

DESCRIPTION
     sftp is an interactive file transfer program, similar to ftp(1), which
     performs all operations over an encrypted ssh(1) transport.  It may also
     use many features of ssh, such as public key authentication and compres-
     sion.  sftp connects and logs into the specified host, then enters an
     interactive command mode.

Answer 2

There is an important distinction to make:

• FTP (urls look like ftp://...) is unencrypted, unprotected, clear, plain File Transfer Protocol
• FTPS (urls look like ftps://...) is FTP over SSL or TLS: the protocol is exactly as the FTP here above, but it runs inside a SSL/TLS encrypted network channel
• SFTP (urls look like sftp://...) is SSH File Transfer Protocol: it's a subsystem of SSH (Secure Shell) and therefore it runs encrypted inside a SSH channel

If you can FTP into your server, then at least we know for sure that there is a FTP server installed there, and hopefully such FTP server is capable of accepting SSL/TLS connections (FTPS) either implicitly (on port 990) or explicitly (connection initiates unencrypted on port 21 and then becomes encrypted by calling STARTTLS).

That does not necessarily imply that SSH/SFTP are available on your server. You should check with your system administrator in order to make sure which file transfer protocol(s) are available, what kind of authentication methods (for example SSH/SFTP supports PKI auth), and so on...