This is an advantage over the common FTP protocol. Uploaded files may be associated with their basic attributes, such as time stamps. An SFTP client willing to connect to an SSH-1 server needs to know the path to the SFTP server binary on the server side. Running an SFTP server over SSH-1 is not platform-independent as SSH-1 does not support the concept of subsystems. It is possible, however, to run it over SSH-1 (and some implementations support this) or other data streams. SFTP is most often used as subsystem of SSH protocol version 2 implementations, having been designed by the same working group. The protocol itself does not provide authentication and security it expects the underlying protocol to secure this. It is sometimes confused with Simple File Transfer Protocol. SFTP is not FTP run over SSH, but rather a new protocol designed from the ground up by the IETF SECSH working group. In SFTP, the file transfer can be easily terminated without terminating a session like other mechanisms do. The file transfer is fast in SCP when compared to the SFTP protocol due to the back and forth nature of the SFTP protocol. While SCP is most frequently implemented on Unix platforms, SFTP servers are commonly available on most platforms.

SFTP attempts to be more platform-independent than SCP with SCP, for instance, the expansion of wildcards specified by the client is up to the server, whereas SFTP's design avoids this problem. An SFTP client's extra capabilities include resuming interrupted transfers, directory listings, and remote file removal.

Compared to the SCP protocol, which only allows file transfers, the SFTP protocol allows for a range of operations on remote files which make it more like a remote file system protocol.

Ssh proxy command