On occasion I find myself needing to send a file at least a few gigabytes in size to a friend across our slow ISPs but haven’t found a satisfying solution. I usually end up creating a private torrent with the announce address of my own IP. Even though it’s slow - it basically never reaches my max upload speed for some reason, it is at least resilient if there are ever any network glitches.
Does anyone else face this same challenge?
EDIT: Thank you for the awesome suggestions! I have some homework to do on these
RFC 2549: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2549
This problem was solved years ago: https://spectrum.ieee.org/pigeonbased-feathernet-still-wingsdown-fastest-way-of-transferring-lots-of-data
You could try wormhole. It makes a direct connection.
If they are local, you can just put it on a thumb drive and physically transfer it.
Absolutely, that is definitely preferred when possible!
If they’re not local, you can put it on a pen drive and mail it to them.
My largest file transfer I have done via USB disk. You simply don’t transfer multiple terabytes over the net.
Before I moved I used to use my web server.
My Domain . Com / files . Zip And I would set a password on the zip. After they download it, they tell me and I remove the file.
I literally just set up a container for Erugo for this exact thing. It worked perfectly and was super easy to do. It’s just a self-hosted version of wetransfer. Could be helpful…
Wormhole.app, can’t recall if they have a limit atm
I use wormhole, but when I’ve wanted to use that website for receiving, I can never tell how to do it.
Can you actually use that site to receive files?
So just like when you send a file you fwd a link, someone tfering files to you must provide the link. They expire in a maximum of 24 hours though so do be aware of that.
I was trying to send from a wormhole app, which I now see doesn’t work with the website.
Syncthing
I have a minio instance that I use to distribute files
I really like Wormhole for this exact purpose.
I’ve use Plik before with success.
Super easy. Spin up an OpenVPN server, forwarding the right ports to your server. Now spin up an Apache server with the folder your file’s in as server root. Send the client config for your VPN to your friend, along with the local address of your HTTP server. Now they can install the OpenVPN client on their PC and download the file from your HTTP server. Once you’re done, tear down all your servers, and don’t forget to unforward the ports. Couldn’t be easier.
/s
I have non-ironically gotten responses like this
Okay can you explain why thats a sarcastic answer? Is one of those first three steps way harder than I think it is?
Cause that’s not simple or easy at all. It takes a fair bit of knowledge to set up all of these things.
Me and my friend used netcat to transfer 30 GB of files put into a zip. Very fun, would not recommend
I use https://www.sendbig.com/ I haven’t read their privacy policy, though.
I use an ancient HTTP File Server program called HFS from Rejetto. Very light weight. Supports making user accounts and whatnot if you want.
I usually just turn it on for a transfer and don’t leave it up these days, but still comes in handy on occasion.
HFSv2 (the windows exe) has publically known unfixed vulnerabilities! Please upgrade to HFSv3 (nodejs, crossplatform). I’m also maintaining a list of other alternatives; https://github.com/9001/copyparty/blob/hovudstraum/docs/versus.md
Thanks!
