The simplest way to access RPi files

What’s the simplest way to access Raspberry Pi file system from a remote computer? FTP server? Samba shares? Dropbox? Modern tools like Syncthing etc.?

Not really. The answer is SFTP. And trust me, I’ve tried them all.

What’s SFTP? SFTP stands for SSH File Transfer Protocol – I guess it’s pretty self-explanatory.

Step 1/2

If you already have SSH access to your Pi and – you probably do – you’re halfway there, as OpenSSH daemon supports SFTP protocol. If you don’t have SSH access – you can enable it by simply following the steps from the official documentation.

Step 2/2

The second and last thing you need is to get yourself a SFTP client. And that’s it. You can try FileZilla or even use a Total Commander file manager (this approach requires plugin you can find here and the Putty SSH Client).

 

And then you just type in your RPi IP address and login using your SSH credentials (the default login/password combo is pi:raspberry – just a quick reminder).

And voilà…

 

 

 

 

 

So this is really the simplest, fastest (in terms of setting it up) and most reliable method to access your Pi files.