myndzi wrote:

I don't imagine tar's format would be terribly complicated to implement directly, though... I mean, it doesn't even include any compression. Anyway, thanks; at least I know I wasn't missing something :)

Again, how do you image WinSCP would untar the file on the remote server? That's not about implementing TAR format, that's about running a code on the server.

I don't imagine tar's format would be terribly complicated to implement directly, though... I mean, it doesn't even include any compression. Anyway, thanks; at least I know I wasn't missing something :)

I'm not aware or any such method. Using tar won't do, as you have no way to tar/untar files on the remote side.

Transferring a bunch of small files in batch over FTP / SFTP is pretty awful. It doesn't appear to have to do with connection speed, it seems to be about the protocol overhead of transferring a single file. Is it possible to do something such as pipe the files through the 'tar' command or similar in order to transfer bulk groups of small files faster?