WebDAV vs S3 vs SFTP

I researched both S3 (Minio on Windows 10) vs SFTP (Bitvise WinSSHD on Windows 10). In the end I ended up going with SFTP for a handful of reasons but I don’t know that it is necessarily better. Here were the pros that I saw:

  • I’m more familiar with it
  • Very straightforward setup. Default options seemed solid, but if you have time there are lots of configuration options to tweak it just the way you want it. Each option is well documented in the UI via tool tips.
  • It’s inherently secure out of the box (can probably make it insecure if you try hard enough) without any fuss.
  • Seems more flexible overall and in my mind a bit more secure. Can configure key based auth, create IP restrictions per user, set up IP blacklisting on too many failed logon attempts etc.

I’ve been very happy with it so far and haven’t had any major issues. The biggest problem is it seems a little slower than I’d like. It takes about 20-25 minutes for each backup to “Verify backend files”. I’m currently backing up about 2.5TB which is around 90,000-100,000 files on the destination. and it takes that long just to do a directory listing via SFTP. I haven’t had time yet to see if there is something I can do to speed it up. It doesn’t seem to be any specific resource bottleneck, but my destination is a very low powered very old netbook so it might just be what it is.

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