If you have one Raspberry pieWhether as a media center, as a low power mini PC, as a retro gaming machine, or for any other purpose, there may come a time when you want to transfer some of your data to the PC. A Raspberry has a “hard drive” Micro SD card, and not all PCs have card reader to be able to read this data and what are the other methods transfer data from a Raspberry Pi to a PC?
This question has a bit of a “trick” in that there are basically one bad and many good ways to transfer data to your PC whether you have a card reader or not. Because? This is what we will explain to you next.
Why using micro SD is not a good idea
Despite the fact that at the beginning we mentioned that we are going to tell you how to transfer data without the need for a card reader, of course the easiest method to do it is of course to remove the micro SD from the Raspberry and connect it to a drive. a PC. However, this is not a very good idea for several reasons which we will explain below.
- The first reason is that in most cases the micro SD card is the boot device of the Raspberry Pi, and that means several things:
- You will have to turn off the Raspberry to be able to safely remove the card; If your RasPi is a server, it means a loss of availability.
- You run the risk of data corruption by using different drives.
- In addition to that, carrying a micro SD card from one device to another carries the risk of it being damaged, dropped, lost, etc.
Therefore, unless you have no other option, we are going to suggest alternative methods to transfer data from Raspberry Pi to PC safely and without having to turn off the device.
How to copy data from a Raspberry Pi to a PC
In total, you will have five great alternatives to copy content from your Raspberry Pi to PC easily and quickly and it also does not pose any risk to your device or the data on it. These methods are:
- Send files to yourself by E-mail. This would obviously only be valid if the data you need to transfer does not take up a lot of space, since most free email services have a maximum limit of 25MB for attachments.
- Use a cloud storage service, like Dropbox or Google Drive. This method is simple, free, and in fact will allow you to sync files on both the Raspberry and the PC.
- Use a USB key. This is the easiest and safest method: just connect a USB drive to the Raspberry Pi, copy the files you need to transfer to it, and then connect it to the PC to use them.
- Download and upload files using SSH: If you are an advanced user of Linux systems, you will know the commands needed to transfer the desired files through your home network using SSH.
- Transfer files with FTP. You can do this through the command line or by using free tools like FileZilla.
With one of these methods, you can transfer files from a Raspberry Pi to a PC and vice versa simply and quickly, and above all: without having to turn off the Raspberry and without endangering your precious micro SD card, which Acts as the device’s hard drive.
