Assuming you’re on Windows, you might find Robocopy to be useful. It’s built into Windows by default and is a Command Line (command prompt/CMD) tool, but once you get the initial bit of it written out, you can just copy/paste that line ad nauseum for every file you need, updating as necessary. You’d still have to set it up for each individual file, but you’d only have to do that once, and it would automatically update the files added as they get changed. It also requires you to be very deliberate with which files you want pushed to the public folder, greatly reducing the risk of an accidental copy/paste.
robocopy "C:\Path\To\Source" "D:\Path\To\Destination" "myfile.md" /R:2 /W:5 /XO
What this does is copies a specified file into the source destination, but only if the file has changed. If it already exists and has changed, it overwrites the file file with the new version.
/R:2 means retry twice, /W:5 tells it to wait 5 seconds between retries. The /XO tells it to only overwrite if the source is newer. (You don’t want to omit the retry and wait times on Robocopy, it has some absurdly high default retry value, in the millions of attempts, with a high default wait time between retries. I’ve accidentally caused my system to hang for hours before due to a failed copy.)
What you would do with this is paste that line into a text file as many times as you need for each file, pushing it to each intended destination, and save the text file as a .cmd file. From there, you can run it whenever you need or, if you want to automate the process, set up a Task Scheduler schedule (also built into Windows) to run the script nightly or even weekly if you don’t anticipate too many frequent changes. From there, you can publish that one folder without risking other files.
An example for a simple website:
robocopy "C:\Dev\Notes\my-site" "C:\sites\my-site" "index.html" /R:2 /W:5 /XO
robocopy "C:\Dev\Notes\my-site" "C:\sites\my-site" "poptarts-icky.html" /R:2 /W:5 /XO
robocopy "C:\Dev\Notes\my-site" "C:\sites\my-site" "strudels-tasty.html" /R:2 /W:5 /XO
robocopy "C:\Dev\Notes\my-site" "C:\sites\my-site" "about.html" /R:2 /W:5 /XO
robocopy "C:\Dev\Notes\my-site" "C:\sites\my-site\styles" "styles.css" /R:2 /W:5 /XO
robocopy "C:\Dev\Notes\my-site" "C:\sites\my-site\images" "no-to-poptarts.jpg" /R:2 /W:5 /XO
robocopy "C:\Dev\Notes\my-site" "C:\sites\my-site\images" "yes-to-strudels.jpg" /R:2 /W:5 /XO
This would move the four HTML pages to the base my-site folder, the CSS to the styles subfolder, and the two images to the images subfolder. In a case like this, I would drop that into a notepad file, save the file as something like “update-website.cmd”, then set up a schedule under Windows Task Scheduler to automatically update nightly or weekly, depending on how often I updated the site.
Again, you still have to manually add each file, but you’ll have to handle each file individually, anyway, and using a programmatic way, you only have to handle each file once and they’ll update automatically forever (assuming you set it up on a schedule).