How to Transfer Files From Your Seedbox

Getting files off a seedbox is the one job everybody has to do, and the reason it feels slow is almost
never your seedbox. It is the method. A single FTP or SFTP stream is capped by one TCP connection’s
round-trip to your house — on a long-distance link that can be a fraction of what the box can
actually push. Use several connections at once and the same transfer finishes many times faster.

This page is the chooser. Pick the row that matches what you are doing, then follow the link for the
full walkthrough.

Which method should I use?

All of these tools are already installed on your box — lftp 4.9.2, rclone 1.74.1 and rsync 3.2.7
— so there is nothing to compile.

The single most useful thing to know

If you take one thing from this page: one connection is slow, many connections are fast.
A single SFTP stream between Europe and, say, Australia may only manage a few MB/s no matter how fast
either end is, because TCP cannot keep enough data in flight over that latency. Eight parallel streams
move roughly eight times as much. Every “my seedbox is slow” report we investigate that turns out not to
be a disk or quota problem is this.

Downloading with lftp, the fast way

From your own machine (lftp also runs on Linux and macOS locally, and under WSL on Windows):

lftp -u YOUR_USER sftp://YOUR_SERVER.myseedbox.site
# one big file, split across 8 connections:
pget -n 8 /home/YOUR_USER/downloads/big.file
# a whole folder, 5 files at a time, each split 8 ways:
mirror --parallel=5 --use-pget-n=8 /home/YOUR_USER/downloads/ ~/Downloads/

Start at 8. Going much higher rarely helps and can trip rate limits.

Sending straight to cloud storage with rclone

Run this on the seedbox over SSH, so the transfer never crosses your home connection at all:

rclone config          # one-time: add your cloud remote
rclone copy ~/downloads/ myremote:seedbox/ --transfers=8 --progress

Full walkthroughs: rclone with Google Drive and
rclone in a browser UI.

Keeping a folder in sync

Syncthing is a one-click install and keeps a folder on your box and a folder at home continuously
mirrored, which suits anyone who wants finished downloads to simply appear.
See the Syncthing setup guide.

SFTP and FTP the ordinary way

Your box speaks FTP on port 21 and SFTP on port 22, using the credentials in your client area. If you
prefer a graphical client, raise the simultaneous-transfer limit — FileZilla defaults to 2, and 8 to
10 is far better. See FTP credentials,
the SFTP guide, and
how to get faster FTP downloads if throughput
disappoints.

Server to server

Moving in from another provider, or out to a new box? Do it machine-to-machine and your home line is
irrelevant — see transferring from a
previous provider and SCP file transfer.

If transfers are still slow

Work through it in this order, because the answer is nearly always near the top:

1. Are you using one connection? Switch to segmented lftp or raise your client’s
   parallel transfers. This is the answer most of the time.
2. Test the line itself with our speed test. If that is fast,
   the box and its network are fine and the problem is at your end or in the method.
3. Check your home connection. A gigabit seedbox cannot outrun a 50 Mbps home line, and
   Wi-Fi is often the real cap.
4. Check disk and quota. A full or over-quota account misbehaves in ways that look like
   slowness — see why my seedbox is slow.
5. Still stuck? Open a ticket with the file, the method and the speed you are seeing.
   That is enough for us to reproduce it.