Getting Started with SSH

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SFTP, which stands for SSH File Transfer Protocol, or Secure File Transfer Protocol, is a separate protocol packaged with SSH that works in a similar way over a secure connection.

FTP is not encrypted, thus packets that your send and receive can be sniffed upon. Moreover, you with FTP you have to open multiple ports through the firewall.

There are heaps of Free FTP programs such as WinSCP and FileZilla. These programs supports SFTP. I've downloaded and installed WinSCP.

Let's now check how we can use it to transfer and delete a file on our remote server.
Open WinSCP. WinSCP supports FTP, SFTP, SCP protocols for file transfers.
Select SFTP from the drop down list for File protocols.

Enter the host name or IP address and type in username and password in their respective fields.

If you have blocked password authentication on remote server, click on advanced button, goto SSH and the Authentication screen. You can enter path of your private key in Private key field.

Press ok when done!

Click Login button.

WinSCP will now ask you to accept the host key. Click Yes.

This will open up a remote connection to our remote server, and you can see files on our remote server.

Let's transfer a file to remote user's desktop folder.

To transfer file over, use Drag and drop.

Once the file is copied across, you will be able to see it on remote server.

To delete a file, simply select file you wish to delete and press delete button on your keyboard.
You will now see that file has been deleted on the remote server.

You can also make use of SCP protocol from the command line itself to copy files quickly.
Let's copy couple of files across to our remote server.

Type command as
scp files to be transferred username@remotehost:/some/remote/directory.

Once the transfer has been made, we are able to see transferred file on our remote server.