Mount Your Seedbox as a Drive (sshfs and rclone)

Short answer: you can mount your seedbox as a folder on your computer over SFTP — sshfs on Linux and macOS, rclone on everything including Windows. Files then open in your normal apps as if they were local, and video players stream straight from the mount. There is no WebDAV on the seedbox; the two SFTP methods below are the ones that work, and both use the port-22 login you already have.

What you need

• Your seedbox hostname, username and password — the same ones ruTorrent and FTP use.
• Port 22. Nothing to install or enable on the seedbox.
• Inside the mount, your login lands in your home directory: your data is in downloads/, so mount that rather than the root.

Method 1: sshfs (Linux and macOS)

# Install
sudo apt install sshfs                 # Debian / Ubuntu
brew install --cask macfuse && brew install gromgit/fuse/sshfs-mac   # macOS

# Mount your downloads folder
mkdir -p ~/seedbox
sshfs -p 22 username@hostname:downloads ~/seedbox

# Unmount
fusermount -u ~/seedbox                # Linux
umount ~/seedbox                       # macOS

The path after the colon is relative to your home on the seedbox, so downloads is correct as written; /home/username/downloads also works. Add -o reconnect,ServerAliveInterval=15 if the mount tends to drop when your laptop sleeps. On macOS, macFUSE needs to be allowed in System Settings → Privacy & Security the first time.

Method 2: rclone mount (Windows, macOS, Linux)

rclone speaks SFTP and mounts on every platform, which makes it the Windows answer. Install rclone; on Windows also install WinFsp, which provides the drive-letter layer.

# One-time: create a remote called "seedbox" (answer the prompts: type sftp, host, user, port 22, password)
rclone config

# Mount (Linux / macOS)
mkdir -p ~/seedbox
rclone mount seedbox:downloads ~/seedbox --vfs-cache-mode full

# Mount as a drive letter (Windows, PowerShell)
rclone mount seedbox:downloads S: --vfs-cache-mode full

--vfs-cache-mode full lets video players seek smoothly and lets apps that write in place behave. Keep the window open, or run it as a background task or service; closing the process unmounts the drive.

Which one

What a mount is good for — and not

• Good: browsing, playing a file in VLC or mpv, opening a document, dragging a few files across.
• Not good: bulk copies of hundreds of gigabytes. A mount fetches one file at a time over one connection. For that, use FileZilla with several parallel transfers, lftp, or rclone copy --transfers 8 — see transferring files from your seedbox.
• Not a sync. A mount shows the live seedbox; nothing is copied. If you want files to appear on a NAS automatically, use Syncthing or a scheduled pull instead — syncing your seedbox to a NAS.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a WebDAV address I can map in Windows Explorer?

No. The seedbox serves files over SFTP and FTP, not WebDAV. On Windows, rclone mount with WinFsp gives you the same drive-letter result.

Can I play a 4K file straight from the mount?

If your home connection is fast enough for the file’s bitrate — a 4K remux can need 60 Mbps or more — yes. If it stutters, the mount is not the bottleneck; the line is. Copy the file first, or stream through Plex or Jellyfin, which can transcode.

Does the mount count against my traffic?

Only what you actually read through it. Browsing folder names costs nothing meaningful; playing a film transfers the film.

Why does the root of the mount show hidden folders like .config?

Because the SFTP login lands in your home directory, which also holds app configuration. Mount downloads, as above, and you only see your data.