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Why I Finally Dropped FTP (And What I Use Now)

I hung onto FTP for way too long, mostly out of habit. It was one of those “if it ain’t totally broken, why fix it?” situations. Then I started actually looking at what was going over the wire and realized: oh, this thing is basically a postcard in the mail.

A few reasons FTP just doesn’t cut it anymore:

  • No built‑in encryption
    Everything, including usernames and passwords, flies around in plain text. Anyone in a position to sniff the traffic can see it.

  • Old protocol with weird quirks
    Active/passive modes, firewalls getting confused, random connection errors. It feels like juggling chainsaws whenever you change networks or VPNs.

  • Security is bolted on, not baked in
    You have to layer other tools or hacks on top to make it “kinda safe,” and even then it feels fragile.

Once I admitted FTP was the weak link, I went hunting for alternatives and ended up trying a few different paths.

What I Tried Instead of FTP

Here’s what I played with, in roughly the order I tested them.

SFTP

This is usually the first stop for anyone escaping FTP.

  • Uses SSH under the hood
    So traffic is encrypted by default, no extra magic required.

  • Same general idea as FTP
    Remote folders, file transfers, directory listings, all that. Most FTP clients also speak SFTP.

  • Good for servers and dev boxes
    Works well when you already have SSH access or are managing Linux servers.

Downside: it still feels very “tool-y.” You open a client, connect, drag files, disconnect. It’s fine, but it didn’t quite merge into my daily workflow the way I wanted.

Cloud Storage (Dropbox / Google Drive / S3, etc.)

Then I went the cloud route:

  • Dropbox
    Great for simple shared folders, auto-syncing between machines, easy for non-technical collaborators.

  • Google Drive
    Nice for documents and team stuff. The web UI is friendly, but working with large file trees or dev resources is clunky.

  • Amazon S3
    Rock solid for storage, backups, and static assets. But out of the box, the interface is not exactly user-friendly. You end up using specialized tools or command line utilities.

All of these are good at what they do: storage and sharing. Where they fall short for me is that they don’t feel like “just another drive” on my system without extra tools. Web UIs and sync folders are OK, but I wanted everything to behave like local storage no matter the provider.

WebDAV

I also experimented with WebDAV:

  • You can mount it like a network drive
    So it sort of replaces the idea of “FTP into a folder,” but with HTTP-based access instead.

  • Supported in lots of systems and apps
    Some backup tools and note apps still support WebDAV as a backend.

In practice, I found the performance hit noticeable when dealing with many small files, and some implementations are finicky. It felt like I’d swapped one set of quirks for another.

What I Actually Use Now

After juggling all those, I ended up building my workflow around cloud storage services but with one key tweak: I wanted them to appear as regular drives on my Mac, like FTP used to, just without the security dumpster fire.

That’s where CloudMounter came in for me.

I use it to mount different cloud services as if they were local disks. So instead of:

  1. Opening an FTP client
  2. Connecting to a server
  3. Dragging files in a cramped remote window

…I just open Finder and there it is: a mounted drive pointing at, say, S3 or Google Drive or whatever else I’m using.

How it fits into my workflow better than old-school FTP:

  • Feels native
    My editor, terminal, and apps see the mounted storage as a normal folder. No separate “transfer step.”

  • Central hub
    I can hook up multiple services (S3, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.) and access them all the same way, instead of juggling different apps or UIs.

  • Security baked in
    The actual connections to the services use modern, encrypted protocols, so I’m not leaking credentials all over the place like with classic FTP.

  • Similar convenience, fewer headaches
    I get the old “remote storage” feel that FTP gave me, but with modern authentication, encryption, and better integration with everything else on my machine.

To be clear, I’m not trying to hype it up as The One True Tool. It just genuinely solved that specific annoyance where I liked how simple FTP felt but hated how exposed and outdated it was. With CloudMounter, I get that same “just mount it and work” flow, only now it’s tied into cloud services and protected properly.

If someone’s still stuck on FTP out of habit, my actual recommendation would be:

  1. Use SFTP if you mainly work with servers and SSH already.
  2. Use cloud storage + a mounting tool like CloudMounter if you want everything to behave like local drives.

That combo pretty much replaced FTP completely for me, without losing the convenience that kept me using it in the first place.

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