At times, when I’m at work there will be situations when I have to transfer files from my PC / Laptop to a remote computer, which is a Windows 2008 server. There are a couple of ways to do it. My office computer has Windows XP installed and my laptop has Windows Vista installed, so I’ll explain the procedure for both (actually, their is no difference 🙂 ).
First let’s start with, different ways through which we can upload / transfer / copy files from local desktop computer to a remote computer which has windows server (windows 2008 in my case) installed on it.
1> Using an FTP program to transfer the files is the easiest and recommended. Get the public IP of a common server, use a free FTP software like CoreFTP or FileZilla and upload / transfer the files on to the common server. These files will be later downloaded on to the remote machine.
Connect to the remote machine using Remote Desktop Connection (procedure explained below), launch the FTP software, log on to the common server where you have uploaded the files and download the files on to the remote machine.
One of the common problems here is, the admin normally would not have instlled FTP software, and if you are not the admin, then you will not have rights to installe FTP software, in such case you can use the command line FTP facility to download / upload files on Remote machine.
This tutorial will help you use FTP service using Command line. FTP route is recommended if you have to transfer big / large chunk of files as it is very quick when compared to the second option.
2> If you are not comfortable using Command line FTP and if there is no FTP software instlled on your Windows Server, then you can use Advanced Remote Desktop Connection feature to transfer files to and from remote machine.
With the advanced feature you can share your local computer drives with the remote machine, as though they are a part of the remote machine. So you can copy / paste the content from one drive to another, as you’d do on your local system.
Advanced Remote Desktop Connection On Windows XP / Windows Vista :
1> Click on Start –> Programs –> Accessories –> Remote Desktop Connection. Alternatively you can Click on Start –> Run –> and type mstsc.
2> Click on Options
3> Go To Local Resources tab, click the More button
4> Select all the drives you want to share and click OK and click on connect. You’ll get a warning message asking if you trust the remote source. If you do then click OK and you’ll be logged into the remote machine.
If you go to the My Computer in remote machine you’ll see drives from your system listed there along with the remote machines local drives.
Note: Only administrators will be allowed to share drives. If you are not the admin, then you should use FTP service to transfer files (which is much faster and easier to use).
my pc died it wont boot up it cuts out before the login screen.
can i connect with a wire to my laptop and transfer data between the two without the pc being logged in?
@Gautam Please thanks for sharing such a wonderful idea with me. I wanted to know if there is a substitute software for the teamviewer. Coz for the teamviewer, i think its transfering speed its slooow. Please i am counting on your usual co-operation.
hi when i started to connect core ftp then my pc r open a new window form temp folder
@Slick Zee – Regarding Vista home premium will have to do a bit of research – a bit tied up now, may be will be able to answer that in week or two.
Regarding file sharing, use teamviewer. In teamviewer, you have option to remote desktop your friends machine and transfer files to and fro. Very handy and a free software if used for personal purpose. Try it 🙂
Gautam, Thanks for your time with me. The thing is i am using Vista home premium. And how can i run this “mstsc” as an administrator? And a question. Like for example, a friend is in The United States and i am in Italy, can i copy something to his drive directly, If this could be possible, Please help me out with the steps and softwares needed. kingpilate at yahoo dot com is my Email Address.
Thanks for your help. And i am counting on your usual co-orperation.
Slick.
@Slick Zee – Which operating system are you using ? This may be a problem if you are using Windows Vista as you cannot run applications as Administrator by default. Which ever OS you are using, try to run RDP as an administrator. Should work. Let me know what happens.
When i goes to the remote desktop connection and after choosing the drives and if i try to connect, it says “The server name specified is invalid” Please any idea what this means or what i should do first?
Thanks and i will be much appreciative if you assist me.
@MFT – Sounds like a cool idea. Worth trying. Will update with my experiment.
Just grab Filezilla SERVER and set it up on your local machine.
Give your machine a static IP on your network.
Open the ports on your firewall (20,21) and point to your static IP.
Use port triggering for PASV range.. set up in options of server something like 25001-30000 and same for port triggering range.
Then with your internet ip you should be able to ftp to your local machine from any remote using the command prompt.. It’s a little tricky to set up but SO worth it to have a real ftp server working on your local workstation when doing remote support.
Also check out dnsexit.com, dyndns.org or dnsalias.com for free dns forwarding.. You can set up your local ftp with a URL instead of having to know your IP address to connect.
Good luck!
@Ryo – Thanks.
Another option is to use Yoics web-folders. Yoics basically turns any folder on your computer into an Apache server, so you can either access the files from any browser – or using the Yoics application – use webDav to spawn Windows explorer from the remote end (folder would then look like a network shared folder).
best
Ryo (yes, from Yoics).
@Anupum – Welcome .. Let me tell you, FTP is a better option over Remote Desktop Connection, as RDC does a lot of redundant checks (security concerns) which are not necessary for normal file transfers which makes it extremely slow !
I always had the same problem, XP and vista thig. Bookmarked for future use…….thnx