Have you tried using SCP? I don't know if Windows comes with a client but a quick search turned up a few options. It is my goto method for transferring files these days but I admittedly don't use Windows.

WinSCP has served me well over the years:

http://www.winscp.net/

I'd love to know the transfer speed differences between SCP, SFTP and FTP - because when I can view both ends of the wire then security is less of a concern than transfer time.

you can use hpn-ssh (high performance) with aes128 (if your hardware has AESNI/padlock/etc) or rc4 (probably faster if your hardware lacks AESNI/padlock/etc) to eke a bit more speed over local connections on trusted lines. throw in compression and you can get good speeds.

rsync-to-rsyncd over a local link is probably faster though (requires more setup though).

You could probably just pipe tarballs through nc too. ;)

The overhead of encryption is marginal and the advantage of being able to compress the stream is considerable.

scp and rsync, which is a fantastic companion, allows on-the-fly compression of content to get truly impossible speeds over the wire.

It is marginal if you want to transfer a file from time to time but if you are in a business where you transfer thousands to millions of files everyday it makes a big difference. FTP is still used because its interface is simple and well-known: good old file-directory paradigm that everybody knows. It is also used because it runs on every platform. I am in favour of having a new protocol but it should: - be faster than FTP (would have to use UDP instead of TCP here). - Firewall friendly. For that, you could use one port to do everything and forget about the data connection (Is it feasible with UDP as you would need to control the flow ?) - Being FTP compliant from the interface point of view. You should be able to replace your ftp client with your fastTP protocol and everything would run. - Add optional strong security. Possibility to encrypt or not the data stream and encrypt the password negotiation.

If we have this and it is marketed well then it could replace FTP.

The difference is negligible when both machines are fast enough to encrypt/decrypt at wire speed, otherwise FTP is faster.

I just tested ftp and scp between my laptop and server over wireless and got about 2.5MB/s on both.

I can happily report to you that your 11g wifi link's data throughput is fully saturated. Achievement unlocked!

scp is very slow, but not sure how slow in comparison to the other two. Copying lots of data between servers on your own network, it's much faster to tar/netcat between the two than scp.

It's slow enough that someone has made 'high performance ssh/scp': http://www.psc.edu/networking/projects/hpn-ssh/

filezilla supports SFTP, as do most modern windows ftp clients. filezilla even supports pagent as an ssh agent, allowing secure passwordless login.

Any openssh server that supports scp will support sftp unless it has been explicitly disabled.