Servers you connect over SSH used to mean Linux. Now a Windows machine works the same three ways: browsed as a drive beside your buckets, migrated off, or restored onto.

BucketPilot works out which kind of machine it is rather than asking you. On the first successful connection it reads the server's own answer, stores it, and from then on separates, compares and contains every path on that server the way that operating system does. There is no dropdown to get wrong.

The part that matters: what Windows won't store

An object key can be almost any text. A Windows filename cannot — and the dangerous cases are not the ones Windows refuses, they are the ones it accepts and quietly does something else with:

• •A colon in a name is accepted, and opens a hidden NTFS data stream — the bytes end up inside a file with a truncated name, and a naive copy reports success for something that exists nowhere you would look.
• •Capitalisation folds. Report.pdf and report.pdf are two objects in a bucket and one file on Windows, so copying both would silently overwrite one and report two successes.

Every name is checked before it is written, per file, and a name that cannot arrive as itself is refused with the reason while the rest of the run continues. On a migration into Windows you can also press Check names first and see the whole list — unwritable names, case collisions, reserved device names — before the run starts, while there is still time to rename them at the source.

Set-up help that matches your machine

The instructions on the server dialog follow the platform we detected, including the two Windows steps that catch nearly everyone: OpenSSH Server is an optional feature there, so a healthy machine that never had it installed looks exactly like one that is switched off; and an administrator's key does not go in that account's .ssh folder — Windows ignores it there, which looks identical to a wrong key. A failed connection test now says which of those it was.

Fast, and incremental

A Windows drive is enumerated by a single process on the server rather than by thousands of round trips, so re-scans only look at what changed. On a large, mostly-unchanged drive that is the difference between seconds and minutes — hourly auto-sync is comfortable on Windows.

Server drives and server destinations are on the Business plan; migrating *from* a server is available from Pro.