Program to browse and transfer files from pc to pc on same wifi

[zveer]

Is there a free program (just transfer files is all I need) to copy files from my pc to laptop (both are win 10) over wifi?
I found some that remind more of facebook than an actual program where you literally share a file and the "other" user has to accept it. 

I'm looking for something like the old homegroup could do, if on same network you could browse all the shared files and then run or even modify/delete them. 
Or at least a program that will auto accept files I send from my PC to laptop. 

Thanks for any advice.

[Skiiwee29]

Teamviewer is what I use when im working on Server stuff here in my house as I can copy/transfer all the files from my PC over to the server from it and should serve your needs well. 

[mariushm]

Install Filezilla FTP Server on one computer, and use Filezilla FTP client on the other computer.

From there, it's drag and drop between computers.

 

On the computer with Filezilla FTP Server, to keep things simple like in the tutorial below you can create a user account for each drive letter and simply connect to it using your ftp client ... you can download with multiple simultaneous threads and all that.

You'll only need the local IP of the computer (or the computer name you see in Network Neighborhood) where the ftp server software is installed (you can see it in Network and Sharing Center or whatever is called in Windows 10 ...

 

 

[LogicalDrm]

There's Resilio Sync. You will need to activate share with link or keycode. But after that it's pretty nice. I've been using it for years to move files between laptop, desktop, phone and tablet. That's 3 different OS' (as old laptop was running Linux).

[zveer]

12 hours ago, Skiiwee29 said:

Teamviewer....

Tried it, works well, speed is 3, 4MB/sec which is not great but acceptable. 

12 hours ago, mariushm said:

Install Filezilla FTP Server ...

I'll try it today. I want to see if it's lighter on resources than teamviewer since my laptop is pretty slow.

3 minutes ago, LogicalDrm said:

There's Resilio Sync. You will need to activate share with link or keycode. But after that it's pretty nice. I've been using it for years to move files between laptop, desktop, phone and tablet. That's 3 different OS' (as old laptop was running Linux).

Would that mean it would copy all files from my PC to laptop?
I can't do that, laptop only has 120GB SSD while PC has 10+ TB.

[LogicalDrm]

1 hour ago, zveer said:

Would that mean it would copy all files from my PC to laptop?

I can't do that, laptop only has 120GB SSD while PC has 10+ TB.

No. You select folders that it will watch and then sync. Using latest modification date, so if I have watched and deleted video on tablet (or moved ebook to another folder), it will delete those files from folder on desktop.

 

It isn't suitable for browsing, you should probably use shared folders on Windows for that. But for moving tens of Gigabytes of videos at once it's really handy. Uses same file transfer protocol as torrents, so you are only limited by WiFi adapters and read/write speeds of drives.

[mariushm]

ftp works just as well and you can find ftp clients for mobile phones easily and for free ...

[GimmeGaming]

Why not just create a shared folder on one of the systems? Would this not be an easier solution?

[homeap5]

11 hours ago, GimmeGaming said:

Why not just create a shared folder on one of the systems? Would this not be an easier solution?

I wonder why nobody answer that before. On the same network and using TeamViewer? Or FTP? Or others complicated programs? Lol. File Explorer is all you need.

It's basically the same question like "how to copy files from one directory to another".

[mariushm]

FTP allows you to transfer multiple files at the same time... it can be a really big deal if you're transferring lots of small files.

It can also offer optional compression - the ftp client or the ftp server can compress the files on-the-fly as they're transferred, which can help with stuff that can be compressed (not movies or music)

On some phones you don't get "network neighborhood", samba, windows shares, but ftp clients are a ton of them... and lots of them free: https://play.google.com/store/search?q=ftp client&c=apps&hl=en

You can also simply download files from your web browser ... you just go  ftp ://  user:password@ip/  (without the spaces) and the web browser enters the ftp account you made.  Uploading to a ftp is not really supported well by browsers.

There's also extensions for Firefox which allows you to upload files to a ftp if you don't want to install separate ftp client.

[homeap5]

1 hour ago, mariushm said:

FTP allows you to transfer multiple files at the same time... it can be a really big deal if you're transferring lots of small files.

It can also offer optional compression - the ftp client or the ftp server can compress the files on-the-fly as they're transferred, which can help with stuff that can be compressed (not movies or music)

On some phones you don't get "network neighborhood", samba, windows shares, but ftp clients are a ton of them... and lots of them free: https://play.google.com/store/search?q=ftp client&c=apps&hl=en

You can also simply download files from your web browser ... you just go  ftp ://  user:password@ip/  (without the spaces) and the web browser enters the ftp account you made.  Uploading to a ftp is not really supported well by browsers.

There's also extensions for Firefox which allows you to upload files to a ftp if you don't want to install separate ftp client.

It has no sense! Multiple files transfer has sense only when copying speed of single file is somehow limited. If you use shared folder and if you have gigabit switch, you'll reach maximum network transfer. Using FTP can slow down whole operation in local network. Not only because additional packets needed to transfer, but also because writing multiple files to standard drives at the same time makes crazy head movement that slow down transfers a lot! And FTP is highly limited compared to normal network share that behave like local drive.

[mariushm]

15 minutes ago, homeap5 said:

It has no sense! Multiple files transfer has sense only when copying speed of single file is somehow limited. If you use shared folder and if you have gigabit switch, you'll reach maximum network transfer. Using FTP can slow down whole operation in local network. Not only because additional packets needed to transfer, but also because writing multiple files to standard drives at the same time makes crazy head movement that slow down transfers a lot! And FTP is highly limited compared to normal network share that behave like local drive.

 

How about you try transferring a folder with lots of small files between two computers using Windows shared folder?

For example unpack the Firefox source code , 90k files , ~ 650 MB : https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/29.0b9/source/firefox-29.0b9.source.tar.bz2

See how fast you copy it from a shared folder... with 1 gbps network speed according to you it should take less than 10s... assuming 100 MB/s speeds.

 

It makes perfect sense when you're dealing with lots of small files.

If you're transferring one file at a time, you're waiting for a significant amount of time for the operating system to open and close the file, and update the last access and last modified times.

When you're requesting multiple files, these operations can be "interleaved" and cached and in lots of cases, the hard drive doesn't even have to seek the files to get them, as it's often in the hard drive's cache (those 4-8-16-32MB of cache on the drive), because the drive basically caches a bunch of tracks it reads, not just that particular file.

Some of those small files will be already cached in the server's ram if they were recently served by the web server / map thing.

 

Also when writing the contents to the destination disk, there's again caching involved... the ftp client and windows will cache writes and they'll be done in bursts and in relatively continuous way, so the destination drive will not be overloaded...again, you're dealing with lots of small files.

 

With multiple connections... you're transferring one small file through one connection and while you wait for that thread to close the file and have the OS aknowledge it, another thread can transfer another file.. getting a higher average transfer speed.

 

* Also, there's also the issue of TCP window scaling... read more about the concept here  or here. Basically, a file transfer always starts with small window sizes, and the window sizes are increased quickly as the other end acknowledges packets received. For small file sizes, the window sizes rarely big, so there's more back and forth communication between devices, which increases time.

[mariushm]

And for any doubters, here's a video I just made :

 

PC 1 ... shitty pc with 2 GB ram and mechanical drive and 100mbps ethernet card

PC 2 ... laptop I type this comment at with wireless card at 130 mbps

 

Copying the Firefox source code I linked to above.

 

Share ... see video, starts at 0:10 and I cancel it at 4:35 .. so 4:25 or 265s. Transferred  19117 files, 152916808 bytes .. so avg. of 577,044 bytes/s

 

FTP ... see video at 5:08 and i pause/cancel at 8:03  so 175s. Transferred 30685 files, 252242393 bytes ... so avg. of  1,441,385 bytes/s

 

=> ftp is 3x faster than regular share with small files.

 

* arguably, the numbers may be a tiny bit off because the first 20k files out of those 30.5k files may have been cached in Windows from the previous copy through shared folder, but even so we're talking about 3x the transfer speed and you can see in the video the network trafic peaking at 50% at some points... so definitely higher bursts.

 

 

note: i'll delete the video in a few days - if someone stumbles upon this comment

[GimmeGaming]

If you look what the op asked. He was looking for something along the lines of homegroups. He is not looking for anything more compliacated. Also I doubt he will be managing the likes of source code or jar files often enough to justify and ftp tool.

Shared folders covers all the OP's requirements.

[homeap5]

Also @mariushm - you're using great FTP tool vs standard built-in Windows copy tool. It's not fair. Use Robocopy to be fair - https://pureinfotech.com/robocopy-multithreaded-file-copy-windows-10/

 

We should compare similar tools - not every FTP clients are multi-threaded (like filemanagers for example - Windows has built-in FTP client, why you don't try to use it for test?). So if you want to compare multi-threaded FTP, compare it to multi-threaded filecopy tool. And good luck.

 

Even if you want to use single threaded copy tool - use fastest (like you used in FTP case) - FastCopy for example. Difference may be huge. I was copying folder with thousand of small files and differences was - 30 seconds (one filemanager for tests), 15 seconds (other filemanager), 4 seconds (FastCopy).

 

BTW. I know what is TCP window scaling. It's not used only for FTP connections but all connections. Including copying files from/to windows shared folders over local network.

 

And more important, as @GimmeGaming said, OP asks for easy browsing files over local network. For sure installing FTP server and FTP client is much more complicated (and limited) than using shared folders/drives.

[mariushm]

For me, Filezilla FTP server is easier to set up than using Windows Shares. I can also just turn off the ftp service or enable it whenever I want to while with shares i have to go through multiple windows just to create or disable a particular share (and have elevated rights window pop up).

Installation is literally next, next, next, finish  then create user and password, add folder(s) to serve, done. maybe add firewall rule if the installer doesn't do it automatically.

The downside is that I can't (easily) run things directly from a windows share but that's not the purpose here.

 

robocopy is cool, but it's command line... you'll find it's more difficult to explain to people how to use a command tool, it's harder to keep track of progress (not great visual indication), harder to pause and resume, harder to download only missing files or resume incomplete transfers  and so on.

Fastcopy will probably be faster but again, less intuitive.. the windows explorer like interface of filezilla ftp client is super easy to understand.

[homeap5]

@mariushm: I was only talking about fair comparsion of speed. It's not that FTP is faster somehow. And in my case I made shares using script (and disable them using script too), so it takes one second to enable/disable shares. Also - it gives me possibility to browse files like in local drive - with generating thumbnails, play movies directly from remote share (not possible in FTP case), listening music from remote share (the same) etc.

 

If you need fast access to files, folders etc. FTP is not the best solution. Well, it may be, but not if we're talking about FileZilla. Only good filemanagers have easy access to FTP like to local folders, but then - most of them do not use multiple connections, because it's not what they're made for. When I browse my files and find any of them I want to copy to other computer, I must start another program, connect to FTP server (that must be established on second computer) and copy file. Too much for browsing and copying single files (or even less than 1000 files). Normal way for me is click on remote computer shortcut in filemanager and copy file in single click. It supposed to be as easy/fast as possible.

 

And about that RoboCopy and FastCopy - true, interface is not nice, but again - for copying single file you don't need special software (no matter, FastCopy or FTP). But if we're talking about copying thousands of small files - it should not be a problem to spend few seconds more to create a script. Or a button in filemanager to use FastCopy (yes, you can integrate FastCopy or RoboCopy into some filemanagers).