FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

• How do I change drive on the remote panel?
• Why can’t I change the owner and the group of a file?
• Why does selecting a file in WinSCP not work as I expect (that is, in the normal MS Windows way)?
• Why WinSCP does not work in a new environment (operating system, machine, user account, network), when it works for me in a different environment already?

• Where do I get a username and password?
• Why is WinSCP not able to connect to a server, when other clients are?
• Can I connect to an FTP server?
• How do I know if the connection is secure?
• I get the message “Received too large (??? B) SFTP packet” when I login. What is the problem?
• Where should I type the IP address of my remote host?
• How can I use WinSCP with OpenSSH for Windows?
• How can I connect without entering private key passphrase each time?
• Why does WinSCP keep on asking me for a session password?

• Can I transfer files between two remote servers with WinSCP (FXP)?
• When I drop files outside of WinSCP, they are moved to the drop target. I want to copy them. How do I do that?
• File transfer speed is very low. WinSCP does not utilize all available bandwidth. How do I improve the transfer speed?
• Downloaded files are stored first to a temporary directory and only after that, they are moved to the destination directory. How do I prevent storing files to a temporary directory?
• I need to overwrite a remote file that isn’t owned by me, but I’m member of its group. The file has write permission for group. After transfer I get a message like “Upload of file <filename> was successful, but error occurred while setting the permissions and/or timestamp”
• Where can I change the file transfer mode (binary, ascii) or enable the auto-select transfer mode option?
• Why is the timestamp of uploaded/downloaded file different from the timestamp of the source file?
• Can I transfer file larger than 4 GiB (or 2 GiB)?
• When I attempt to copy files, I get an Error 127. What does this mean?
• Why does file size and/or content change during transfer?

• How can I configure the default local or remote directory for the session?
• How do I save a session, so that I don’t need to fill in all the login information every time I start WinSCP?

• My script works fine when executed manually, but fails or hangs when run by Windows Scheduler, SSIS or other automation service. What am I doing wrong?
• How do I configure session, transfer and/or any other settings for which there are no script commands?
• How do I know that script completed successfully?
• How do I transfer modified files only?
• How do I transfer files and remove them afterwards?
• Why the switches do not work in my script?
• Why I cannot connect/transfer using script, when I can using GUI (or vice versa)?
• Why is WinSCP returning non zero exit code?
• How do I create script that synchronizes files and deletes synchronized files from source afterwards?
• How do I transfer (or synchronize) directory non-recursively?

• Synchronization or keep remote directory up to date functions are not working. Why?
• What do direction options (local, remote, both) for Synchronization mean?

• How do I connect to my iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad?
• How do I do … on iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad?

• How do I change user after login (e.g. su root)?
• Can I change my account password with WinSCP?
• Why WinSCP breaks permissions (jail, chroot)?
• Can I have a local directory in both panels (turn WinSCP into file manager)?
• Why is remote file timestamp shown in WinSCP panel shifted by one hour from actual timestamp of the file?
• How do I make WinSCP show localized and/or UTF-8 encoded (Unicode) filenames correctly?
• Why are the changes, I upload to webserver, not visible in the web browser?
• Can WinSCP show me HTTP URL address for the selected file?
• Can I map a remote directory as a network drive in Windows?
• What is error code 4?
• How do I transfer my settings to another computer? How do I import/export my settings?
• I cannot read the file panel font. How can I make the panel font bigger?
• What command-line parameters can be used with WinSCP?
• How to keep the user in a specified directory on the server? (chrooted session)
• Can the internal editor be better (e.g. syntax highlighting)?
• Is there some API that I can use to add file transfer functionality to my application?
• Can you provide us with export control information/FIPS certification for WinSCP?
• Can I recover password stored in WinSCP session?
• Can I undelete remote file removed with WinSCP?

* How do I change file permission using WinSCP?