Truck For Mac

Truck is a user-friendly and minimalist macOS utility designed from the ground up to provide you with a faster and more secure alternative to transferring files via FTP.

Moreover, the Truck app is a drag-and-drop enabled graphical user interface for the command-line based rsync file copying utility which allows you to upload and download data via an encrypted SSH tunnel connection.

Before connecting to a computer using Truck, you have to make sure that the remote machine has an SSH service running in the background, as well as an installed copy of rsync.

Thankfully, if you need to transfer files to or from macOS machines, both those conditions will be met by default, with the mention that you have to enable the "Remote Login" option from the Sharing preference pane in the System Preferences app to start the SSH server.

The Truck application comes with a straightforward and intuitive user interface which makes it possible to effortlessly manage the servers you want to connect.

Once connected to a server of your choice, you can start uploading or downloading files either by clicking the Download or Upload at the bottom of the server browser window, by drag and dropping the files onto Truck's window, or by using the options available within the right-click contextual menu.

At the moment, Truck can be used to copy files to and from Google Cloud, Amazon AWS, Dreamhost or any other servers which come with sync-over-SSH capabilities.

To log in to a server, Truck provides you the option to use both your username and password combination or your private SSH RSA private key when needed.

It is important to mention that, although created as the perfect tool for users who want both speed and secure connection when transferring files to and from a remote server, it does not provide bi-directional synchronization capabilities and it cannot be used as a legacy FTP client.

Regarding the system resources required by Truck to transfer your data, on a Mac mini with a 2 GHz Intel Core i7 processor and 16 GB  of RAM it needed up to 15% of the CPU and about 150 MB or RAM when transferring three video files of around 700 MBs.

Taking all of the above into consideration, Truck is the app to have on your Mac if you want to move on from the legacy FTP transfer protocol and start using rsync to copy data to and from remote servers via an encrypted SSH tunnel connection with no setup required. Moreover, if you want transfer speed benchmark results or further details on its long list of features, they are all available on the Truck homepage.