Self-Hosted Main

You are comparing apples to bean and cheese burritos here.

FTP/FTPS/SFTP aren't even close to the same thing as a fully integrated cloud solution. Sure you can use both things to simply transfer files between several devices, but that's not ~~why~~ the only reason most people use a cloud solution.

It is conceivable that there could be a cloud solution which might incorporate the use of SFTP/FTPS as an underlying protocol, but I think the go to is HTTPS for myriad reasons.

NOTE: if you are regularly using one of the FTP-like tools to sync files as part of your regular workflow, you should look into rsync

I mean it all depends on what you are using it for. Would I use it to simply transfer file from point A to point B? No, that’s what SFTP is for.

Would I use it to keep files in sync regardless of if I updated it on Point A or Point B? Heck yea! Could you do that via FTP? Maybe but it’d be manual and easy to screw up.

Would I use next cloud to share a directory with a friend? Yep! Couldn’t do it with SFTP? Probably but setting up a user and permissions is kind of a pain. And if I’m going to be sharing out single files all the time with tons of randoms, SFTP just isn’t going to cut it.

Would I use next could for versioning? Probably as long as it’s not code (I’d use git for code). Could you do that with FTP? Not really, not unless you did v1, etc in your files names etc. And at that point, you just must really hate nextcloud.

That’s just a few examples. Theres a ton more based on use cases. And in most of them you could probably find a solution using just SFTP. But it’ll probably be a lot more work than just using a more appropriate tool.

Nextcloud does a fair bit more than those things, no?

Synchronisation and versions control is the key

This reminds me of a somewhat famous top comment on the Hacker News announcement of Dropbox.

In my opinion, they do different things.

SFTP/SCP are great ways of transferring files between computers. I prefer rsync for most things because it can resume transfers and checksum results. I'd never use FTPS because SFTP/SCP comes with SSH, and why run a separate service? SSHFS is another way to use SSH to transfer files (it mounts a remote file system to your local computer so you can use all your normal file management tools).

NextCloud (and similar) do a bunch of additional things:

• Provides clients which sync files to your local computer
• Provides a web interface for managing files
• Provides ways to share files without creating accounts
• Allows connecting external storage (eg. S3)
• Provides encryption
• And a lot more

If SFTP does everything you need, that's awesome. Use it. :-)

The reason for downvotes is comparing apple and oranges, and also throwing FTP in the mix!

Let’s consider SFTP and nextcloud. SFTP is a secure respected protocol for file transfer. If you use key authentication and disable the password authentication, it approaches to be bulletproof security wise. SSH has rarely had a vulnerability that would allow attackers in. It’s even have post quantum cryptography. It’s rather easy to set up. But it doesn’t do more than file transfer. It also doesn’t have a lot of GUI apps.

Nextcloud is like Dropbox. You can find A LOT of things in it (though frankly the quality of most of them may be low). File transfer is just one of the things that it does. It uses https, why? Because the web technologies and developers have focused on this versatile protocol in the past decades. You access internet through port 443 not 22!

If I want to backup data or transfer files, I use SFTP. Over the internet, I trust SFTP not nextcloud. For other things, I use other tools such as Synchting, nextcloud etc. Synchting allows syncing over SSH.

"with an nice client?"

You gave the answer to yourself. There aren't any user friendly multi-platform clients with synchronization / conflict resolution / versioning.

I don't think you get what FTP is and isn't. FTP and the actually secure flavors of it are just the protocol used to move the files back and forth. Nextcloud, Google Cloud, DropBox, etc do a lot of other things on top of the protocol they use to move files. If you can find an FTP client that does all of the version control, conflict resolution, automation, etc that you get from Nextcloud and others then by all means use it if you want. But there is a reason that is almost non-existent while NextCloud and other programs actually do that stuff.

I actually used to use SFTP to move files back and forth between my laptop and desktop back in the day. Other and better tools have taken the place of it.