~ (tilde) means you are inside the home directory
/ means you are inside the system root directory. Only here will you be able to search for system files like /etc configuration files.
$ means a CLI of a normal user
# means a CLI of root user

When cd'ing to directories, there is no need to append a / to the beginning. And in windows as well.

I think blue are directories

Left slash is windows. Right slash is linux. linux will not understand left slash and it will just
concatenate all the path together.

>scp C:\Bar\hello.txt root@{myinstance}:/home > this works
scp -r C:\Bar\Servers\demo-app root@{ip}:/usr/share/nginx/html > works for directories