I just found out recently that SCP is horribly slow when transferring lots of small files. I found a blog post showing how to send compressed tarballs over SSH and it worked really well:

ssh username@from_server "tar czf - directory_to_get" | tar xzvf - -C path_to_save

...or use rsync?

   rsync -avz somehost:/path/to/src /path/to/dest

For a more accurate sync, you can also delete obsolete files on the destination:

    rsync -avz --delete src dest

This assumes there are no files you want to keep on the destination, of course. You can exclude them or reorganize to keep them safe.

The trick is knowing when that's going to be faster than rsync.

And it comes with a compatibility mode (sftp).

Not really:

> SFTP is not FTP run over SSH, but rather a new protocol designed from the ground up by the IETF SECSH working group.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSH_File_Transfer_Protocol

I know it's not ftp over ssh. I meant what I said in the context of the original comment; if ssh is the ftp replacement, then there is an application which transfers files over ssh with commands similar to those of ftp, which is sort of a compatibility mode to help ftp users migrate to ssh. (Although it is a new protocol from the ground up, it is usually used as a subsystem of ssh, thus using the same passwords and authentications and stuff.)

Bah, I can't think of a case where the user interface of ftp is so precious it can't be replaced with rsync or sshfs.

You're thinking of FTPS.