Seedbox.From.Scratch.03 - Get Your Files Home Without Using FTP

[SaP]

This is part 03 in my Seedbox From Scratch series. In this series I start at the most basic level, assuming no server or Linux skills. First we built the easiest and most basic seedbox possible, and now we will continue by adding some of the more basic features.

Once you have your seedbox happily seeding torrents from your favorite private trackers, you’ll likely want to know how to get those files off your seedbox and back home. With most private trackers, you do not want to use BitTorrent from your home as well as your seedbox because it will hurt your ratio to download it (leech it) from the torrent cloud twice. Instead, you want your seedbox to do all the seeding, and get the files to your local computer in some other way.

Today we learn what just might be the simplest way to do that, and we won’t need FTP.

Many people are familiar with FTP (File Transfer Protocol), and this is indeed the most common way to get your movies, music, and other content back home. However, setting up an FTP server on your seedbox and using an FTP client to download them is a bit of a hassle. FTP is also not known to be all that secure unless you really know what you’re doing.

SFTP

In this tutorial, we’ll skip all that and instead use SFTP, which is already set up by default on your Ubuntu server. (See the first post in this series, Setting Up Your Very First Server, if you have not yet set up your server.)

If you have SSH access to your seedbox, then by default you will have SFTPaccess to your seedbox.

There are many ways to use SFTP, including the robust and cross platform FileZilla. But today I want to show Windows users how to install a little Windows Explorer extension that will make it easy to drag and drop the files from their seedbox to their local computer. The extension is called swish.

Install Swish

Start by downloading it from the Swish website. After installing the program, simply open up Windows Explorer and click on “Computer”. Then click on “Swish”:

Next, click on “Add SFTP Connection”:

You will be presented with a dialog box. Fill in the “Label” with any name you like.

Fill in “Host” with the IP address of your server.

The “User” is root.

The “Path” is /var/lib/transmission-daemon/downloads/.

This will create a new icon in Computer -> Swish named after whatever you named your seedbox.

When you double click on that icon, you will be asked for your password, and then shown a list of files on your seedbox.

You can drag the files to a location on your local computer.