FTP that works with Catalina?!

MrHoffman wrote:

Lurkums wrote:

peter_watt wrote:

"Cyberduck works great in both 32 and 64 bit."

On Catalina??

Yes. On Catalina

Yes, CyberDuck works on Catalina.

But not as a 32-bit app.

While a 64-bit app, or an app built as a 32- and 64-bit “universal binary” app will work on earlier macOS versions and as far back as it’s been built for, a 32-bit app will not work on Catalina.

This is pedantic yes, but there’s been a whole lot of confusion among the folks either considering or having performed upgrades to Catalina. 32-bit apps do not work on Catalina.

I was ignoring the 32 bit thing. If folk don't know after all those warnings that 32 bit is gone, then no amount of telling will work. Cyberduck on Catalina is Cyberduck on Catalina

As far as speed goes, in multiple tests of uploading the same 15 files of varying sizes to the same server, it took various FTP clients this amount of times:

- FileZilla, 19 seconds

- ForkLift, 39 seconds

- Transmit, 45 seconds

I didn't test Cyberduck because it's not dual pane and that would be inconvenient in my work.

So there are several options for FTP clients that have been discussed here. Cyberduck, Transmit and the like. All good.

The original poster was looking for dual pane which Transmit does.

Then the monkey wrench was thrown in that they did not want to pay too much for software that they will only use a couple of times. There are choices here that fit that bill but maybe not give you the full options you are looking for. $10 is not an extreme amount of money to ask for given the time and energy someone put time to write software for, especially if its good.

There are others out there that charge more or less and give you a wide range of functionality accordingly. If you were a software developer, what is the amount you would charge for your software that keeps you in business and makes you want to support your software and/or write more software for people.

I guess what I am trying to say is. Support software developers making software that you like. Your support directly messages them to write more. It the software sucks don't buy it or use it. You get what you pay for. Stop whining that all software isn't free, appreciate those developers that give you trials or give you great software for free (there are those out there that do). More features and functionality sometimes do come at a more expensive price tag for the programming that had to happen to bring it to you.

IMNSHO

The problem with Cyberduck not being dual pane for me is that I deal with a few dozen servers. Each server has their own local and remote directories. Doing that with drag from Finder windows would be an enormous nuisance. That's why dual pane is needed for my work anyway.

Transmit has bugs which I have reported to Panic. In particular, at least with my servers, if I try to transfer a file of a few MB then at the end the remote server ends up with 0 bytes in the file, after repeated tests.. So Transmit is off the table for me now. Could it be an issue with my FTP server being sort of old? Maybe. But there are other FTP clients which don't experience the same problem.

Forklift also seems nice. But I ran into some issues with that as well, which the developer is looking at.

But the fastest and most reliable so far is FileZilla, even though it looks sort of clunky on the Mac, and you can't customize some things like the toolbar, or the sound it makes when transfer is complete. But FileZilla is the fastest by far, and 100% reliable so far, and it is dual pane, and you can have tabs for different connections that are open at once, and you can see the transfers taking place in the transfer queue nicely. And they also have a very responsive support community where you can get answers about settings questions very quickly. I might ask a question about FZ there and get a response in an hour. If I ask Panic Support a support question in their recommended Twitter support it could be days before I get response.

So for me, for now at least, I'm using FileZilla.

PuTTY? The Windows SSH app? <smh>

Your wiki list omits the world #1 most popular ftp app - ftp. Just because Apple doesn’t ship it with the operating system anymore doesn’t mean you can’t install it. Personally, I’ve always preferred ncftp. And then there is always cURL, which is included wih the operating system.

@etresoft - PuTTY? - Well, yes.... but I thought it did sftp/scp. I haven't used it in years though. Maybe it was an older version? Or perhaps I misremembered? I've installed it, and indeed it's only useful for SSH as a terminal window.

I think the discussions around FTP is mainly due to Catalina disrupting access to NAS storage and people are trying to find alternative access methods to their NAS stored data. There are other threads about SMB not working after a Catalina upgrade, which is what happened to me.

FWIW - I went the direction of changing my NAS H/W. I was attaching USB HDDs to my router/modem, which now fails to allow connections from my iMac. I bought a Raspberry Pi4 and attached my USB HDDs to it and all works fine again.

I've just discovered another reason to use FTP/SFTP on a Mac. When copying files from a Mac formatted disk to NAS storage, which will almost certainly be NTFS, or similar, formatted disk results in these Mac source fork files, ._*. You can clean these from the Mac with the dot_clean command, but using an FTP/SFTP client can prevent these files being created.

The mail was from the forum bot not from me.

Being partly 32-bit is not a side-effect and unless they re-wrote it, it will not run on Catalina. The family have said no more work will be done.

The code may have been stolen so I would not encourage anyone trying "new' versions unless notarized by Apple.

So far, of the dual pane FTP clients, the only one that works well for me on my particular servers is FileZilla, even though it is rather clunky looking. I ended up running into problems with all the other ones. FIleZilla is also the fastest it seems.

I use Transmit. It has an excellent GUI and works flawlessly in Catalina.

According to the FileZilla folks, it should work... Check with them, if you’re running the most current?

add Yummy FTP PRO to the list

I used YummyFTP for years and loved it and was surprised that it didn't work. And the Yummy site has disappeared and email to the developer is bouncing, so I guess it's gone.