Received failure with description 'Failure' in while uploading to SFTP server with FileZilla

Question

I faced this issue many times. While uploading or editing any file from FileZilla it its showing error message

Error: error while writing: received failure with description 'Failure'.

After the upload file the file size will be 0 byte.

My server is AWS EC2 with Minimum instance class type.

Solution 1

The "Failure" is an error message for error code 4, returned by the OpenSSH SFTP server for various problems, for which there's no more specific code in the SFTP protocol version 3. While the server should at least return a specific plain-text error message, it fails to do so.

Common reasons you may get the generic "Failure" error message, while uploading are:

• Uploading a file to a full filesystem (HDD).
• Exceeding a user disk quota.

These reasons will even agree with the empty file when the error occurs.

For details, see SFTP Status/Error Code 4 (Failure).

Solution 2

I created a file (without an extension) instead of a folder by mistake. When I tried to create a folder with the same name, I had the same error as yours.

To fix issue, I removed the file and created the folder again.

Comments

[Martin Prikryl]

That's basically covered by the link in my answer. It is just a variant of "Creating a directory that already exists".

[Yann Rimbaud]

I came across the issue today and I wanted to make an additional answer that does not require to click on another link.