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Comment on How do you manage your server files?

ftp ans sftp are completely different things. ftp is a very old protocol and can be run encrypted as ftps. sftp runs over SSH and is pretty common to use.

Naming is truly one of the hardest problems in computer science.

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FabianRY@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Thanks😅. I wasn’t aware, and until today thought that sftp is just like “the secure version of ftp” (never heard of ftps), and not different things at all. I have still a lot to learn in this field.

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- kevincox@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Unless you went out of your way to set up FTP and get a TLS certificate I would put my money on you using SFTP which uses SSH for authentication and transport security. It doesn’t require anything to set up other than TOFU server keys and a client key or password for authentication.
  
  Which is probably the right thing to use. Really you shouldn’t be using FTP anymore. Probably you just want HTTP for public data and SFTP for private authenticated data.
  
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blotz@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
what! thats so dumb xD. so ftps stands for file transfer protocol secure, and sftp stands for ssh file transfer protocol? we have reached recursive acronyms.

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- kevincox@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yup super confusing. The way I remember it is that https is http + SSL so ftps is ftp + SSL. The weird one sftp is an entirely different protocol that uses SSH to transfer files.
  
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  - blotz@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Okay this has made it so much worse. i figured that the s in https and ftps stands for secure like a reasonable person. of course it doesnt xD. you would think that this is at least consistent but alas. guess what s in ssh doesnt stand for :)
    
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    kevincox@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I don’t know if the s is actually “SSL” or “secure” but the point is that the are the same protocol, running over an encryption layer. So adding an s suffix is running the same protocol over some encrypted transport. You see this s suffix for lots of things like irc/ircs and dav/davs.
    
    This is different to sftp which isn’t related to ftp at all other than they are both protocols that transfer files.
    
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