It is kind of unbelievable that in 2012 there is no easy way to send large files to another person through the Internet.
I had a friend that wanted to send me something that was ~80 MB. Gmail’s limit is 25 MB, so that was out. Many of the options were too technical, like setup an FTP site. Some of the options were less technical but are still difficult, like Dropbox (both recipients have to have software, then I have to figure out way of firewalling folders off for only certain users, not others).
It is amazing to me there isn’t a simple way to send someone a large file like sending them an email. Maybe Grandma wants to send me a big zip file full of pictures. We need something that can pass the Grandma test.
Dropbox doesn’t require software on either end, you can use the web interface. It has a folder called ‘Public’, and only files put there are accessible without your account info. And you get a hyperlink to any file you put there that you can send to Grandma, all she needs to do is click and save.
I’ve…heard…from a friend…that there are very large porn files here and there on the internet that people send back and forth. Maybe you could see how they send these files and send your files the same way.
In general, you break them up at your end, and the person puts them back together at the other end. There are many ways to do this, all a Google-search away.
Or there’s always torrenting it. (It’s more than just pirates.) If it’s private info, put it in a password protected format (RAR file will compress it and also be able to password protect).
Do both ends need to be grandma-friendly? Because I can send large files to anyone by putting them on the HTTP server on my desktop, and e-mailing a link. My end of the operation would be cumbersome for someone like my mother, but it’s completely transparent for the person I’m sending to.
Yea, both ends being user friendly is best, because half of the time the less technically savy party is the sender. It needs to be easy enough to walk them through it on the phone - not an easy feat!
If you can set up torrenting (installing special software and configuring your nat router to allow traffic directly to a port on your computer) you have done all the difficult work in just using secure ftp and send thing directly between two computers.
Oh, yeah. Grandma will have no trouble downloading and installing a proprietary archiver which might not even be available for her operating system, figuring out how to make an online payment of $40 if she wants to use it for longer than the prescribed trial period, and finally creating a password-protected archive with it. Then I’m sure she’ll have no problems selecting among the dozens of BitTorrent tools out there to download, install, and use to create a BitTorrent file for the RAR archive. Then it will be a simple matter for her to find a reliable public BitTorrent tracker which will accept this torrent for distribution, and to communicate this information to you so that you can start downloading the file.
there are several easy to use remote support packages like teamviewer and the like that can allow you to connect to grandmas machine and help her. Or we could set her up with a remote support contract from my biz and whenever she has a question she can call us to help her for one low monthly fee :D.
Yeah. No. Installing a BitTorrent program is as easy as installing any kind of program. Creating a link to the torrent to share is extremely simple. Password protecting it is contingent on lots of things and RAR is free and easy to use.
Maybe you’re confusing the ease of downloading a torrent that’s already seeded and tracked by somebody else (easy for the computer literate, doable for patient grandmas) with the ease of having to create a torrent for one of your own files, find a tracker willing to list it, and then waiting around to seed it (tedious for the computer literate, probably impossible for grandma).
It’s a lot of complexity for zero benefit since you’ll likely be the only seeder/peer.