I’m currently debating on how to manage files on my servers. I have a jellyfin and a minecraft server on which I need to add, remove or download files quite often. I don’t really want to use scp for everything, so I was wondering what everyone uses.
Edit: I’m looking for a gui solution, but a somewhat automated process of backups etc. is also nice
Edit 2: For anyone wondering what my final solution was: I am currently using a wireguard vpn on a raspberry pi to access my servers. I use Xpipe as a gui interface to transfer my files. I also just use tmux and ssh to execute commands and run services.
Linux?
I just use sshfs to mount ssh shares and move files between them like any other folder.
Same with samba shares (windows).
You can do the same on Windows (mount ssh shares), there is an Fuse like project for Windows: WinFsp.
IDK what OS you are on but on Linux most file managers have support for remote filesystems. SFTP (SSH-FTP, not to be confused with FTPS which is FTP-secure) is ubiquitous and if you use scp then you already have SSH set up.
If you need Windows support it is more of a pain. You may need to set up Samba or WebDAV and permissions can suck. But you can also download a third-party file browser that supports remote protocols.
So basically SFTP, and I fairly regularly just use a graphical file manager when I am doing one-off operations.
I’m using debian, so sftp would be an option, do you use a graphical client?
Right now I am just using nautilus (default GNOME file manager) but in past I was using Thunar (default XFCE file manager). I’d be pretty surprised if whatever file manager you are currently using doesn’t support SFTP out of the box. Typically you can just enter something like sftp://myhost.example into the location bar. They may also have a dedicated network connection section with a wizard to add it.
I’m considering this, as I can see by your example, you can add a domain name to the server. How would you go over doing this?
NFS comes to mind, naturally.
I remember some years ago scp had a big issue, can’t recall what, though. But that made me have a look at rsync, and I’ve been using that ever since. Flags are a bit atteocious, but I’ve aliases rsync -avz status=progress to copy and it’s been happy days. One other benefit - incremental copy. Helps in cases where a copy procedure had been stopped for whatever reason.
I wouldn’t really recommend NFS unless you need to remote mount as a “true filesystem” with full support for things like sockets, locking and other UNIX filesystem features or you need top performance. It is so difficult to do authentication and UID mapping that it typically isn’t worth it for simpler use cases like “add, remove or download files”.
scp can be slow with large numbers of small files. rsync is much better at that and can do differential transfers if you need that. Since rsync can also run over SSH it can be very easy to just use it as a default.
Sftp using the KDE file browser Dolphin. Keeps it simple for my monkey brain as if I’m accessing the drive locally.
Plex/Jellyfin is automatically managed by Sonarr/Radarr so I don’t touch those.
But for game servers I use Pterodactyl which has a nice WebUI to manage the server and its files, and has automated backups.
pterodactyl looks really neat, will definitely look into that. I have a manual system for my media library, so I want to add the directories with artwork and movies manually to the directory which jellyfin reads.
https://github.com/filebrowser/filebrowser might be what you want for that, just a basic web based file management tool.
But you could also just use SMB and access the shares directly from file explorer.
