Thursday, September 03, 2009

Transfer Large Files

I needed to transfer a 300+ MB file from one computer to another over the Internet.  Typically there a a few options available to me for this purpose but in the particular case none of those worked.

So I begin a search for Transferring Large files and I found an article that reviewed some tools for doing this.  I tried to leave it up in a browser so I could post a link to it but last night my computer loaded some updates and reboot and now I can’t find it again.  If I do I will post it. 

One of the options I came across and have used before was yousendit.com .  The problem was this has a limit of something like 100 MB and most of the solutions have such a limit unless you pay for a subscription.  I don’t need a subscription to do this like 2 times a year. 

A couple of the options caught my eye because they allowed for pretty large files and you didn’t even have to register or give them your name.

One that I tried was transferbigfiles.com this was pretty cool.  I believe it would transfer 1GB files for free.  You tell it the file name and give them an email to send it to.  They upload the file to their storage using Amazon S3 technology (which is basically Amazon selling huge amounts of internet storage for little money).  The only problem I had was not knowing it it was uploading.  This size file would take over an hour to upload and the status meter just froze.  Of course as the site says this is in Beta so it may or may not have been working but I wasn’t patient.

The winner, and the one I ended up using was pipebytes.com.  It worked great.  You tell it which file to send and it gives you a web address for the recipient to go to to begin the transfer.  You don’t give them  any other info and the file doesn’t go onto their servers.  It is transferred directly from one computer to another.  And the best news is it gave me a progress meter that worked (but it is also still in Beta).  It’s free too.  However for free you only get a transfer rate of 512 Kbps.  I suppose that could be adequate but I went ahead and  bought what they called a speedpass.  I was under the gun and it was getting late so didn’t want to take a chance that it would be super slow.  With a speedpass it will transfer as fast as 3 Mbps (depending on the sending and receiving network setup).  I purchased a 24 hour speedpass for $.99.  Less than a dollar and my 300+ MB file transferred in about 1 hour.  It worked like a charm and I thought I would share it.

2 comments:

Send Big said...

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ROCKY said...

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