After some research, I believe that some past change in OpenSSH broke the automatic callback to SCP, when SFTP is misconfigured (e.g. when Subsystem sftp points to an invalid path). Does this correspond to your setup? The fallback still works, when SFTP is not configured at all (no Subsystem sftp directive).

Thanks. I'll look into it.

I found where "Allow SCP fallback" was, in advanced site settings

But it was already enabled as you said by default.

Here are the logs

and here is what happens,
same connection settings
but I explicitly specify SCP

2026-10-22_07h09s53_WinSCP_Login_587x301.png

and I attach the logs of that next

Hello,

I was on 6.5.5, but I updated to 6.7
2026-10-22_06h56s00_1410x688.png

attempt connection in default SFTP mode
2026-10-22_06h57s18_689x1191.png

Failed with error 127 "Cannot initialize SFTP protocol. Is the host running an SFTP server?"

I can't seem to find "Allow SCP fallback" in the menus
2026-10-22_07h02s23_930x1670.png

I will add the log in the next post

WinSCP does fallback to SCP, when SFTP is not available.
See the "Allow SCP fallback" option (enabled by default).
https://winscp.net/eng/docs/ui_login_sftp
If it does not work with your server, please attach a full session log file showing the problem (using the latest version of WinSCP).

Hi,

I just discovered I could use WinSCP without installing an SFTP server on my space constrained OpenWRT device.

It took me a really long time to figure this out

2026-10-21_12h56s07_WinSCP_Error_689x384.png

I always assumed I needed to install openssh-sftp-server

But all I needed to do was change the protocol to SCP.

2026-10-21_12h59s23_WinSCP_Login_587x301.png

I think it would be a nice bit of polish, instead of erroring out, to not error out and work instead by auto trying SCP when SFTP fails. I imagine there's a way to query the server for capability, since that error occurs after the login has completed already.