Files, Uploads, and VPS Transparency

The Files section of your Dashboard is a window into your bot’s server: everything it makes, everything you give it, and everything it remembers. Browse, preview, upload, and download, all without any technical setup.

No tunnels. No exposed ports. No sharing links. Just your files, in one place.

The three spaces

Your bot’s server has three kinds of content, and the Dashboard treats each one appropriately:

Space	What lives there	What you can do
My Files (~/files/)	Output your bot saves for you, and files you upload	Everything: preview, upload, download, delete
Workspace	The bot’s working area: scripts, drafts, work in progress	Look, but not touch: preview and download only
Media	Photos and files you send on Telegram, images your bot generates	Preview, download, delete

The Workspace is read-only by design. It’s your bot’s desk, and deleting the wrong thing there could break it. If you want something in the Workspace removed, just ask your bot.

Note

A small number of system files (credentials your bot uses to talk to AI models) are never shown, in any view. Everything else is yours to see.

Recent: never lose track of anything

The Recent tab is the first thing you see. It shows the newest files across all three spaces, each with a badge showing where it lives. If your bot built you a report yesterday, it’s at the top of Recent, even if the bot saved it somewhere unexpected.

Uploading files

Send files to your bot straight from the Dashboard:

• Drag and drop files anywhere on the My Files view, or
• Click Upload and pick files (up to 50 MB each)

Uploads land in whichever folder you’re viewing. Your bot is notified the moment the upload finishes, so you can go straight to Telegram and say “summarize the PDF I just uploaded”, no path required.

Tip

You can also send files to your bot on Telegram. Those arrive in the Media tab.

Where bot output goes

Your bot is instructed to save all output to ~/files/, so My Files is where reports, pages, scripts, and exports normally appear. It can organise into subfolders, for example ~/files/reports/ for weekly summaries. Tap a folder to navigate into it, and use the breadcrumb to jump back up.

Markdown and text files in ~/files can also be included in your QMD document index so your bot can search them later without re-reading entire files.

Tip

You can tell your bot exactly where to save something: “Save that as a PDF in ~/files/invoices/”. It’ll create the folder if it doesn’t exist.

Peeking inside the Workspace

The Workspace tab shows the bot’s own working area. This is transparency, not control: you can see the scripts it wrote, the drafts it’s keeping, the research it’s collected, and download any of it.

By default the view hides OpenClaw’s system files (the bot’s standing instructions, identity, and internal notes). Flip the System files toggle to see those too, read-only.

Memory: what your bot remembers

The Memory tab renders your bot’s memory as readable pages:

• Long-term memory, the curated facts your bot keeps about you and your ongoing work
• Daily logs, one per active day, its running notes
• Learnings, rules it wrote down after making mistakes

It’s read-only, and it’s one of the best ways to understand your bot. If you spot something wrong in its memory, tell it on Telegram: “That note about my timezone is wrong, please fix it.”

Previewing files

Tap any filename to open a full preview, no download needed. The preview adapts to the file type:

Type	What you’ll see
Markdown (.md)	Rendered formatting, with a toggle to view raw text
HTML (.html)	Rendered page, with a toggle to view source
Images (.png, .jpg, .gif, .svg, .webp)	Inline image
Code & text (.txt, .csv, .json, .js, .py, etc.)	Plain text
PDF (.pdf)	Embedded PDF viewer
Video (.mp4)	Video player
Audio (.mp3, .wav)	Audio player

If a file type can’t be previewed, clicking the name won’t do anything, use the download button instead.

Copying the file path

Every file and folder has a copy path button (the clipboard icon) next to its name. Tapping it copies the full server path to your clipboard, for example:

~/files/reports/weekly-summary.md

This is useful when you want to tell your bot to read, update, or do something with a specific file: “Update the file at ~/files/reports/weekly-summary.md with today’s numbers.”

Downloading files

Click the Download icon next to any file (or the download button inside the preview panel) to save a copy to your device.

Note

Files up to ~6 MB can be downloaded directly. For larger files, ask your bot to compress or split them first.

Deleting files

In My Files and Media, click the trash icon next to a file, then confirm. The file is removed from your server immediately and can’t be recovered. Workspace files can’t be deleted from the Dashboard, ask your bot instead.

Why not just open a port or tunnel?

Other setups often require you to expose a port on your server or use a tunneling service (like ngrok) so you can access files remotely. ClawOps doesn’t do this, for good reason:

• Open ports are attack surface. Every port exposed to the internet is one more thing that can be targeted, misconfigured, or exploited.
• Tunnels require ongoing trust. You’re routing your private files through a third-party service.
• It’s unnecessary complexity. You’d need to manage authentication, keep the tunnel running, and deal with URL changes.

The ClawOps approach is simpler and safer: your server stays closed, and the Dashboard fetches files on demand over the same secure connection it already uses for everything else. There’s nothing extra to configure, nothing extra to secure.

Tip

Your bot won’t spontaneously share files with anyone. Everything stays on your server until you explicitly download it.