If you are using username and password for SSH authentication, you will be prompted to enter your password. You need a SCP client which is included in Bash shell of most Linux distributions and Mac computers and PowerShell. It uses the same authentication and security as SSH. SCP is a common tool for secure copy files between a local and remote machine. The last method is specific to Microsoft Azure and requires a bit of setup by Azure administrator as well as installing some software. If you are using Azure virtual machines and login with Azure Active Directory, you will get more instructions on how to connect. The first three methods can be used to access any virtual machines that you have ssh connection. I decided to write down four ways to achieve this goal.

In this post, we will not go through performance considerations for each tool/method. There are no requirements for retaining the permissions on the files being transferred. We are referring to Linux virtual machines in this post unless we explicitly mention Windows virtual machines as well. They also need to download some result files or data to their local machines. There is a common need for our university researchers to securely transfer small or large files to virtual machines for various purposes.

Transfer files from virtualbox to host