Transferring files to a Linux server by using WinSCP

14 October 2015, Wednesday 0 Comments

WinSCP is a GUI-based file manager for Windows that allows you to upload and transfer files to a remote computer using the SFTP, SCP, FTP, and FTPS protocols. WinSCP allows you to drag and drop files from your Windows machine to your Linux instance or synchronize entire directory structures between the two systems.

To use WinSCP, you'll need the private key you generated in Converting Your Private Key Using PuTTYgen. For more information, see Converting Your Private Key Using PuTTYgen. You'll also need the public DNS address of your Linux instance.

Download and install WinSCP. For most users, the default installation options are OK.
Start WinSCP.
At the WinSCP login screen, for Host name, enter the public DNS address for your instance.
For User name, enter the default user name for your server. For siterobot.io Amazon Linux servers, the user name is ec2-user, for Ubuntu servers the user name is ubuntu.

Not: If you get permisson denied errors, you must be root for operations:
Environment > SCP/Shell > Shell: select sudo su
Specify the private key for your instance. For Private key, enter the path to your private key, or click the "…" button to browse for the file. For newer versions of WinSCP, you need to click Advanced to open the advanced site settings and then under SSH, click Authentication to find the Private key file setting.

Note: WinSCP requires a PuTTY private key file (.ppk). You can convert a .pem security key file to the .ppk format using PuTTYgen. For more information, see Converting Your Private Key Using PuTTYgen.
Click Login to connect, and click Yes to add the host fingerprint to the host cache.