What is your favourite way to transfer files in your homelab?

Not gonna lie, I just map a network share and copy and paste through the gui.

People have already covered most of the tools I typically use, but one I haven't seen listed yet that is sometimes convenient is python3 -m http.server which runs a small web server that shares whatever is in the directory you launched it from. I've used that to download files onto my phone before when I didn't have the right USB cables/adapters handy as well as for getting data out of VMs when I didn't want to bother setting up something more complex.

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.

scp

Rsync and NFS for me.

sftp

All my machines have my keys, nothing to set up, nothing to tear down.

Syncthing

rsync is indeed fiddly. Consider SFTP in your GUI of choice. I mount the folder I need in my file browser and grab the files I need. No terminal needed and I can put the folders as favorites in the side bar.

• sftp for quick shit like config files off a random server because its easy and is on by default with sshd in most distros
• rsync for big one-time moves
• smb for client-facing network shares
• NFS for SAN usage (mostly storage for virtual machines)

rclone. I have a few helper functions;

fn mount { rclone mount http: X: --network-mode }
fn kdrama {|x| rclone --multi-thread-streams=8 --checkers=2 --transfers=2 --ignore-existing --progress copy http:$x nas:Media/KDrama/$x --filter-from
~/.config/filter.txt }
fn tv {|x| rclone --multi-thread-streams=8 --checkers=2 --transfers=2 --ignore-existing --progress copy http:$x nas:Media/TV/$x --filter-from ~/.config/filter.txt }
fn downloads {|x| rclone --multi-thread-streams=8 --checkers=2 --transfers=2 --ignore-existing --progress copy http:$x nas:Media/Downloads/$x --filter-from ~/.config/filter.txt }

So I download something to my seedbox, then use rclone lsd http: to get the exact name of the folder/files, and run tv "filename" and it runs my function. Pulls all the files (based on filter.txt) using multiple threads to the correct folder on my NAS. Works great, and maxes out my connection.

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.

As a lazy person, I just prefer sftp on thunar.

What do you mean by specifying IP address?

WinSCP for editing server config

Rsync for manual transfers over slow connections

ZFS send/receive for what it was meant for

Samba for everything else that involves mounting on clients or other servers.

By "homelab", do you mean your local network? I tend to use shared folders, kdeconnect, or WebDAV.

I like WebDAV, which i can activate on Android with DavX5 and Material Files, and i use it for Joplin.

Nice thing about this setup is that i also have a certificate secured OpenVPN, so in a pinch i can access it all remotely when necessary by activating that vpn, then disconnecting.

Magic wormhole is pretty dead simple https://magic-wormhole.readthedocs.io/en/latest/welcome.html#installation

I use this a lot at work for moving stuff between different test vms, as you don't need to check IPs/hostnames

rsync if it's a from/to I don't need very often

More common transfer locations are done via NFS

yeah I also use SFTP using FileZilla. Or like everybody mentioned including yourself, rsync to sync files across computers. Or even scp.

Syncthing and/or ftp.

I'd say use something like zeroconf(?) for local computer names. Or give them names in either your dns forwarder (router), hosts file or ssh config. Along with shell autocompletion, that might do the job. I use scp, rsync and I have a NFS share on the NAS and some bookmarks in Gnome's file manager, so i just click on that or type in scp or rsync with the target computer's name.

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.

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.

Depends on what I'm transferring and to/from where:

• scp is my go-to since I'm a Linux household and have SSH keys setup and LDAP SSO as a fallback
• sshfs if I'm too lazy to connect via SMB/NFS (or I don't feel like installing the tools for them) or I'm traversing a WAN
• rsync for bulk transfer and backups
• Snapdrop/Pairdrop for one-off file/text shares between devices with GUIs (mostly phone <--> PC)
• SMB if I'm on a client PC and need to work with the files directly from the fileserver
• NFS between servers
• To get bulk data to my phone (e.g. updating my music library), I connect via USB in MTP mode and copy from the server via SMB or sshfs.

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

I like unison personally. It is a bit more of a hassle but it works pretty well.

I have a shared syncthing folder on all my devices

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.

Just 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.

SFTP! 😃

rsync over an SMB share was pretty seamless.

I used rsync but specifying the IP address and the folders and everything is bit fiddly.

If this is Linux:

• You can throw an entry in /etc/hosts to add a hostname mapping, even if you don't want to set up DNS:

    192.168.34.16       tea
  

• It looks like bash has tab-completion for rsync paths set up by default these days on my Debian box. Will probably need to have passwordless or ssh-agent-based pub/privkey authentication set up in some fashion.

• If you don't need rsync's functionality -- replicating attributes and reasonable resuming and doing partial copies -- I tend to use lftp, which supports sftp, an ssh-based file-transfer mechanism; one uses something like sftp://remotehost/remotepath. That's more-comfortable to browse, can bip around the local and remote filesystem with tab-completing cd, lcd, pwd, and lpwd and list remote files. The mirror and mirror -R command will move a file tree from or to the remote system.

• If you do want rsync's "update changed files" functionality, and also want bidirectional synchronization in each direction instead of rsync's unidirectional functionality --- I do this to maintain a synchronized directory of videos that I want to be able to watch offline on various devices, among other things --- I use unison. You can set this up to auto-synchronize a set of directories. If you've got a preconfigured set of directories to synchronize set up, just type "unison", and bam.

• If I'm doing a lot of browsing and work on the remote end, I use emacs's dired plus TRAMP as a rough approximation of a "two-pane file manager", more-properly called an orthodox file manager. emacs /ssh:remotehost:/remotepath localpath will fire it up. TRAMP is pretty clever, tries to do stuff on the remote machine as much as possible -- like, you can do stuff like version-control on remote directories and it'll use git on the remote machine, can grep through the remote file tree without transferring the files locally, etc. That being said, this is probably mostly-applicable to users who already heavily use emacs, but it's a handy technique if you have only a low-bandwidth connection and need to work on files remotely. I have emacs set up to default to using the "other pane" as a default target for things like copy and move commands using the following text in my init.el:

    ;; Try suggesting dired targets                                                                                                
    (setq dired-dwim-target t) 
  

• If I'm wanting to play a video file remotely, I'll sometimes do a sshfs mount using FUSE:

    $ mkdir videos
    $ sshfs remotehost:/videos `pwd`/videos
    $ mpv videos/vid01.mkv
    $ umount videos
  

Resilion Sync

Snapdrop if they both have a gui/webbrowser. https://github.com/SnapDrop/snapdrop

Scp otherwise

rsync -are ssh from to@pc:/dir