Selfhosted

I use KDE Connect. Works well with Tailscale when I'm outside my home network.

KDE Connect

LocalSend on both devices is something I’ve used

On the same network with device discovery localsend can be a good alternative.

It works on most devices, even IOS IIRC

Localsend

PC to phone:

• USB cable
• KDE Connect
• Nextcloud
• Syncthing

PC to PC:

• USB drive
• SFTP
• SSH
• Nextcloud
• Syncthing

Phone to PC:

• USB cable
• KDE Connect
• Nextcloud
• Syncthing

1. syncthing (file synchronization)
2. kdeconnect (file transfers, clipboard sharing, presentation remote)
3. deskflow (keyboard and mouse sharing)
4. warpinator (one off file sharing)
5. rsync / scp (one off file copies / backups)

For sending files between a phone and a PC, I use KDE Connect.

For sending files between PCs, I use SSH.

Both are really simple and lightweight tools that normally come preinstalled, and you can use them with no configuration.

KDE Connect and SyncThing

Everyone else mentioned most of what I would suggest.

One is missing for your original problem. Localsend. Think airdrop but cross platform. Super useful if you have a mix of devices (iOS, android, windows, etc…)

There's PairDrop, you can self host it but iirc it transfer via webrtc so as long as the devices 'see' one another there's no mitm.

Nextcloud

Depends on the scenario, but I'll use KDE Connect, NextCloud, VaultWarden send, or just go old scp.

Honestly, syncthing, croc, vaultwarden send, Send (fork of firefox's send before they discontinued it, still works), Privatebin, etc.

Taildrop if you use Tailscale.

Surely I can use Syncthing inside Tailscale but 1. I have to depend on their public discoservers, or 2. I have to host and configure the discoserv myself for every client which is tedious to do

For phone <-> PC I use localsend. If I do PC to PC, possibly even large amounts of files or large files in general I put them on a network drive specifically intended for that purpose

Syncthing for everything: file transfers, backing up phone photos, synced obsidian vaults, etc.

kde connect for most things

copyparty for the rest

I either use KDE Connect or Pairdrop depending on which devices I am sharing befween

For one off files, pairdrop is cool.

https://pairdrop.net/

You can self host it.

FilePizza

https://github.com/kern/filepizza

I use Bluetooth. Or if a device doesn't have it, I will drop it into my server with scp or filebrowser.

magic wormhole

For files I use syncthing (also for music/photos/notes/etc... syncing files is IMHO the way to go wherever applicable).

For sending links to my PC (eg. articles linked from podcasts' notes) I used to rely on firefox sync, but I'm starting to distance myself from Mozilla so I am gonna experiment with wallabang.

For sending small notes to myself (stuff that I want to sort or act upon when I get to my PC), I'm using signal's "note to self" but I'm investigating alternatives because signal doesn't mark such messages as unread and so sometimes I forget I've sent some.

Copyparty. Or any other web file server.

Most of the time I use Nextcloud. If I can't wait for the file to sync I'll use either email or a jump drive depending on which devices I'm moving data between. I

If I remember that I can, I'll occasionally use bluetooth to send from my phone to one of my computers.

I use a mix of few things

• kapus.app for starters where a device is completely new and I need to pass some secrets like login to Nextcloud to get keepass or something
• Nextcloud - documents that I rarely access. Some bigger files
• syncthing - for often access files like main keepass. Home server acts as a de-facto hub.
• quick share for an airdrop replacement
• if quick share is not working for some reason I also have a private channel on matrix where I can share some stuff quickly as-hoc

Syncthing. I connect both devices to same Wi-Fi, copy a file to a shared directory, and wait a minute.

my boss just emails stuff to herself.. or just lets it sit in drafts (imap) with the attachment.

i use localsend, wormhole, or similar usually, especially if one or both the devices aren't "mine".. and if it's stuff i'm 'sending' to a handheld from a pc, i might instead drop them somewhere on one of our dietpi boxes and just use http

I always have SSH everywhere on everything and I could never understand why anyone ever would want to make it more complicated than that.

Mostly Nextcloud, for my Keepass databases that doesn't work though. Because the android client handles files completely different than the desktop versions.

So for that I use syncthing with my home server being a hub, that everything syncs to locally, if I need updates to propagate while I'm not home I VPN in. However I rarely need to do that.

feem worked good for me over WiFi, going from grapheneos to Linux mint.

I really like microbin to copy paste files around.

I have sftp setup on my 2 main PCs and a client on my phone (it's not a server). For the rest of the family who have dual Mint/Windows boots I also have warpinator installed on mine and theirs - it's point to point for the enrolled devices but is currently only setup to work within the LAN.

https://warpinator.net/

Primary filesharing is simply the NAS which is visible to all devices on the LAN (can be made available externally but I haven't). This is a recent addition and no one uses warpinator any more.

Edit to clarify I don't have sftp server on phone

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.

[Thread #1 for this comm, first seen 5th Jun 2026, 07:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

USB Stick and USB wire?

no need to fiddle with an app, nothing to configure, no updates, works even with relatively big file sizes, surprisingly fast?