Hoping the people here can provide some insight. We're looking at upgrading the FTP solution we use at my company into something more robust, but I'm having trouble finding reputable reviews of similar software. I was hoping for something similar to a Gartner report, but it doesn't look like they've made one for FTP/MFT/EFT.
What we're looking for is an application that can handle both ftp/sftp transfers, as well as provide a web interface for transferring files to us. We work with remote contractors who record audio for us, so the files being sent would be large WAV files, which is why I've avoided a cloud solution. I'd rather not have them transfer the files to the cloud, and us have to re-transfer them down to us. We work with pretty tight timelines.
I'd also like the ability to have event hooks, or triggering hooks, so I can run automated processes on our side after a file completes transfer from the outside to our servers.
So far I've been looking at CrushFTP, Titan FTP, as well as some big buys like Attunity & GoAnywhere.
Anyone have any experience with software and recommendations or stay-away-from's ?
Yep. Stay away from FTP if you want any expectation at all of security on the public internet.
SSH is your best option.
sarcasm aside, let's look at actual options.
Do you really need a web interface? It's quite frustrating to get one that is robust/reliable for large files.
As far as hooks go, you're probably best off with a cron job running a scan. Would be your most reliable option.
I've heard good things about GoAnywhere though. Might be worth doing a product demo.
Unfortunately web interface is a higher priority than it should be. The people that are uploading files are usually not that technical, and setting up an SFTP client and showing them how to use it is always a pain point. Add to that that we become the maintainer for any issues that they may have using said SFTP client.
Idealy I'd like a solution where they just goto a web page, and after signing in, have an easy (opinionated I know) few click solution to just "upload" and then select whatever files, and the web app will handle the rest in the background.
The thing about file upload is that it will be slow as balls through the web. Even on the same network.
When I say slow as balls, I mean this:
Half throughput of a gigabit connection in some cases. My setup has a fairly moderate server (8320E, 32 GiB RAM) and maxes out at 60 MiB/s when using Nextcloud.
When I just use SFTP I get the full throughput.
SMB also has terrible performance, its selling point is convenience.
Install Filezilla, sign in with account on server, click/drag, upload. That's not hard, if people can't do that then I question if they can even do their job correctly.
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Welcome to my hell. I'd prefer users just using an end-client, and the SFTP drag & drop solution, however, we're getting out of supporting that from the client side (as it was taking up too much of our Tier 1 support time). The solution I'm looking for would have to be as idiot proof as possible, and while I know transfer speeds wouldn't be that great, the UI would be cleaner for the end-user.
The convience part is a primary focus, as the people that are going to be uploading files to us are... technologically impaired, so even if it's slower, it'll save us labor in the long run rather than trying to support walking through setting up FTP for them.
I'd say go Dropbox, or self-host with Nextcloud.
Self-hosting with nextcloud would work, but I find it really finickey and prone to random failures.
OP is trying to avoid transferring the files twice, if I remember correctly.
In that case, CentOS with people just using FleZilla to SFTP would be the most effective. All the OP would have to do is create user accounts and create a sane directory structure for /home and he'd be golden.