Hello selfhosted! Sometimes I have to transfer big files or a large amounts of small files in my homelab. I used rsync but specifying the IP address and the folders and everything is bit fiddly. I thought about writing a bash script but before I do that I wanted to ask you about your favourite way to achieve this. Maybe I am missing out on an awesome tool I wasn’t even thinking about.
Edit: I settled for SFTP in my GUI filemanager for now. When I have some spare time I will try to look into the other options too. Thank you for the helpful information.
sftp
All my machines have my keys, nothing to set up, nothing to tear down.
What’s wrong with rsync? If you don’t like IP addresses, use a domain name. If you use certificate authentication, you can tab complete the folders. It’s a really nice UX IMO.
If you’ll do this a lot, just mount the target directory with sshfs or NFS. Then use rsync or a GUI file manager.
Just don’t run rsync as a daemon as that’s a security nightmare
Why would you do that? That sounds awful…
The daemon tracks file state, so the transfers start quicker because rsync doesn’t have to scan the filesystem.
Right, but if you’re transferring things that frequently, there are better solutions.
Not necessarily. Rsync deltas are very efficient, and not everything supports deltas.
It may very well be the correct tool for the job.
Anyway, problem fit wasn’t part of the question.
Yeah, there are probably a few perfect fits for it. I don’t rsync between machines very often, so the only use case I might have is backups, which is already well covered with a number of tools. Otherwise I just want to sync a few directories.
It is, rsync sends data in plain text. There is a optional password that is also sent in plain text.
I never even set up DNS for things that aren’t public facing. I just keep /etc/hosts updated everywhere and ssh/scp/rsync things around using their non-fqdn hostnames.
You could also use mDNS to the same effect.
What do you mean by specifying IP address?
Snapdrop if they both have a gui/webbrowser. https://github.com/SnapDrop/snapdrop
Scp otherwise
Or https://github.com/schlagmichdoch/PairDrop if you don’t want to support a project bought out by LimeWire
rsync over an SMB share was pretty seamless.
you can use a regular ftp server with administrator and user rights, distribute rights to those who replenish, and those who just take - guests at home I transfer in this way from computer to computer without connecting them to a common network, what could be simpler? why invent some ways with keys or bash if there is a 40-year-old technology that just works great, and to open ftp it is enough to enter the IP address in the explorer
Ähm. So your not gonna like this but I just connect with vscode remote-ssh and drag’n drop em from the os file explorer into the vscode one.
So long story short scp I guess.
smb share if its desktop to desktop. If its from phone to PC, I throw it on nextcloud on the phone, then grab it from the web ui on pc.
Smb is the way to go if you have identity set up, since your PC auth will carry over for the connection to the smb share. Nextcloud will be less typing if not since you can just have persistent auth on the app / web.
Solid explorer on android is pretty useful too, it can access the SMB share. I use nextcloud for photo backup, but usually solid explorer for one off file transfers.
rsync -are ssh from to@pc:/dirJust regular old WinSCP, or XPipe for smaller stuff and editing config files.
I need a GUI, I’ll use rsync to migrate a lot of data to a new server or something occasionally, but it’s just a pain compared to a nice graphical file browser.
I like unison personally. It is a bit more of a hassle but it works pretty well.
Ye old samba share.
But I do like using Nextcloud. I use it for syncing my video projects so I can pick up where I left off on another computer.
Samba Bamba!!
rsync over ssh or scp.
I work from home, however my two systems (home and work) are on the same LAN, they don’t see each other for file sharing. I get paid via direct deposit like everyone else which means my pay stubs are all electronic. I print those out and then use WinSCP to copy those over to my desktop. No other files are ever sent.
At home, depending on the amount of files, I either use SFTP via Filezilla, or if the mood strikes me and for a single file, I will just use SCP if I’m already on the cli which is most of the time it seems anymore doing work on my personal servers. I’ve found that SFTP is faster at transferring than doing a copy/paste to the NFS share to the same drive.
Not gonna lie, I just map a network share and copy and paste through the gui.
Yeah, I mean I do still use rsync for the stuff that would take a long time, but for one-off file movement I just use a mounted network drive in the normal file browser, including on Windows and MacOS machines.
Same lol, somebody please enlighten me on a faster way!
Sounds very straight forward. Do you have a samba docker container running on your server or how do you do that?
Do you really need a container for Samba?
I see the benefits of containers, but a use would be overkill.
Yeah, if OP has command line access through rsync then the server is already configured to allow remote access over NFS or SMB or SSH or FTP or whatever. Setting up a mounted folder through whatever file browser (including the default Windows Explorer in Windows or Finder in MacOS) over the same protocol should be trivial, and not require any additional server side configuration.
Set up smb on my file share VM.
My dedicated docker host accesses it through an NFS mount.I just type
sftp://[ip, domain or SSH alias]into my file manager and browse it as a regular folderYOU CAN DO THAT???
Linux is truly extensible and it is the part I both love and struggle to explain the most.
I can sit at my desktop, developing code that physically resides on my server and interact with it from my laptop. This does not require any strange janky setup, it’s just SSH. It’s extensible.I love this so much. When I first switched to Linux, being able to just list a bunch of server aliases along with the private key references in my .ssh/config made my life SO much easier then the redundantly maintained and hard to manage putty and winscp configurations in Windows.
Dolphin?
Any file manager on Linux supports this
I have two servers, one Mac and one Windows. For the Mac I just map directly to the smb share, for the Windows it’s a standard network share. My desktop runs Linux and connects to both with ease.
I dont have a docker container, I just have Samba running on the server itself.
I do have an owncloud container running, which is mapped to a directory. And I have that shared out through samba so I can access it through my file manager. But that’s unnecessary because owncloud is kind of trash.
