I have been testing out SftpDrive the last few weeks (currently version 1.5) and have to say that it’s really a very nice piece of software. It solves a “simple” (from the user’s POV) problem and it solves it well: Allowing you to mount a server where you have only ssh/sftp access as a windows networkdrive, which makes it very convenient to work with the files, be it through an editor or other tools. Files can be acessed and copied just like files on local drives. And it’s software that “just works”, which means you can configure it (easily) such that it does everything in the background on startup, without ever bothering you.

It supports password-based authentication and key-based authentication. And – which is very nice – it supports proxying an sftp-connection through another ssh-server. That’s useful, because I only allow ssh-login to my home-machine from restricted IPs/IP-Ranges, and I already used to manually proxy through another server to access my home machine – That however made moving files even more cumbersome previously. The proxy option in SftpDrive is a nice solution to that problem.

When key-based authentication is used the keys can be imported and exported from OpenSSH format, and are otherwise stored internally (i.e. in the windows-registry). When a private-key is imported, which is encrypted with a passphrase, that passphrase is asked for on/before import and then never again. Which is nice when you want the drives to always just be there. It’s not so nice, when you prefer ssh-agent’s way of asking for a passphrase once per session and otherwise storing the keys encrypted. However this is planned to be added soon.

What finally convinced me to shell out money for it, was the very nice support. It really shows that it’s not something from faceless big company X, but that it’s Jeff and Dave that know and like what they do. And I mean that not because of the blurb and the pictures on the homepage, but because of the very cooperative and friendly way they listened and reacted to questions and requests. They care.

I only know of one alterative (Webdrive) which is more expensive (though also supports regular FTP and Webdav). I have not tried it, so I can’t comment on how well that works (but they do offer a short-period trial version).

Software: SftpDrive (www.sftpdrive.com)
Price: USD 39,-
Trial: Fully functional for 6 Weeks

All in all, SftpDrive is well worth checking out, if you repeatedly move files to/from remote drives via SSH/SFTP.