I need help understanding what the community’s recommendation is for how to save my files across two pcs without having to manually cut and paste or setting up a NAS.

My situation is that I have a Linux server running Opensuse pulling down media through an Arr stack setup. It only has .5 TB available but I have a Windows PC with 3 TB available. I would like to know if there’s a way that I can seamlessly direct my Linux server to save onto my windows PC without me having to manually copy and paste.

Let’s say I initiate a download of a .75TB file on my Linux server, can I just have it save directly to my available 3TB windows PC? And then be also able to tell an app like Jellyfin to read it from there?

Long term I was thinking that I would set up a separate NAS but I don’t want to do that for a few months. I want to stabilize my current setup before adding another machine.

Am I crazy to think that I can save files to my windows computer from my Linux server? I have tried to look into different things. I started going down the route with samba, but it seems to only show files to my windows PC but not actually save them there directly from Linux. I’ve looked into FTP/SCP but I don’t know a good guide or if would do what I need. I am struggling understanding the networking portion of this, so let me know if I am wrong.

As a secondary question, if I had a NAS, could I also point some of that free 3TB from the windows pc to be used as part of the NAS?

Edit: I struggled a lot with this and ultimately got scared away from it for the connectivity reasons mentioned below. I ended up figuring out how to mount an external drive using fstab. This should meet my short term goals. Thanks all!

    • Okus@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Thank you. I am attempting this today. I seem to be struggling with this. I typed in $ sudo mount -t cifs //HOME/sharedmain /mn

      HOME is my pc and sharedmain is the folder I created and shared with everyone.

      When I run it I get: Couldn’t chdir to /mn: no such file or directory.

      I’ve googled a couple of these terms but I’m not getting any cleaner answers.

      • NightEagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        Try using the IP address instead of the NETBIOS name, it’s usually more reliable that way. Also the error you are getting is because the /mn folder needs to be created beforehand (the mount command doesn’t create the mount point for you). Also make sure you have the cifs package installed for your distro. Hope this helps :)

      • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
        41·
        1 year ago

        I assume your PC is at home and the server at the datacenter. If you actually try to this you’ll most likely end up with broken files and I/O errors because your home’s internet connection might fail, drop or whatever… and you’ll have to deal with port forwarding and the fact that is a very bad idea to expose SMB to the internet.

          • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            You can follow the other recommendation about mounting SMB shares under Linux or eventually setup an SSH server on Windows and use SSHFS to mount it on the Linux machine.

            SSH is usually faster than SMB however both of them will have issues, what if the network goes down the windows machine sleeps, reboots, crashes or someone steps on a network cable etc? You are better by avoiding those kinds of setups all together. It is very likely that the connection will drop and the Linux machine will have trouble writing on the mount causing errors and screwing the files. Those setups won’t also translate unix permissions and other details very well and might create other issues for you.