Share large files easily

[learninmypc]

The Internet is one of the best ways to share information. Just put a status up on Facebook and 800 million people can potentially read it. Upload a video to YouTube and millions of people can watch it.

So, why is it so hard to send a large file to a friend? Most email services don't allow attachments over 20 megabytes. If you want to send a 50MB file, which isn't really considered that large anymore, you're out of luck. Share large files easily

 

[DelJo63]

hmm; sending large files (via email or uploading to a server) is not much of a file sharing concept IMO. Print/File Sharing gives access to a file on one system to multiple users on your LAN or elsewhere in the Internet without duplicating or spraying those bits about redundantly.

File Upload and Email size restrictions while archic, really do throttle the bandwidth being used and the server storage space required. When YouTube & Facebook have sufficent storage to allow 10millon (10^7) users to upload 100-200 files (2x10^2) of 50mb each (5x10^7), then those restrictions will likely be removed
{ (10^7) x (2x10^2) x (5x10^7) = 10x10^16 }

As email will 99% of the time traverse one or more nodes in the Internet Backbone,
controlling goofy file transmissions of xxx mB (which btw belong to the FTP protocol) is a good idea.

 

[SNGX1275]

While what you said has a point jobeard..

I remember a few years ago I was working at Missouri University of Science and Technology as an Associate Research Engineer. At the time we were working a project that had researchers from Lincoln University and Carnegie-Mellon University. I had a video file that was important to our research that I needed to get to CMU. It was a few hundred megs. There simply isn't an easy way to get something more than a couple hundred megs to another party. Sure you can set up FTP, or maybe you can do a P2P transfer over an IM client. But these are frequently things that a typical user in a 'corporate' environment can't do because of access restrictions.

You'd think that university IT depts could accomodate, and at least temporarily set up a www access to a file, but that was not the case with our IT dept. They would not temporarily increase my public_html storage quota, nor would they make a temporary space for the file. Now Missouri S&T is supposed to be a pretty technologically advanced university, if they aren't willing to do this for researchers, how many other schools are? Whatever happened to Internet 2? Wasn't that specifically for crap like this? I'm getting off topic now.....


Anyway.. Drag dropping a big file to a webpage getting a link and being able to send someone that link is pretty nice. Definitely would have been useful a few years ago for me.

 

[mailpup]

Years ago I would email large files by archiving them in a zip file and spanning them into manageable sized pieces. On the other end once all the parts were received they could be recombined.

 

[DelJo63]

You'd think that university IT depts could accommodate, and at least temporarily set up a www access to a file, but that was not the case with our IT dept. They would not temporarily increase my public_html storage quota, nor would they make a temporary space for the file.

That's somewhat sad and comical at the same time :lol:
Given that FTP was one the earliest protocols build exactly for this kind of exchange
of academic information, and that the basis for rejecting the request was on quotas rather than security or intellectual property rights.
Someone just didn't want to cooperate - - I'm sure you've seen that before.

Anyway.. Drag dropping a big file to a webpage getting a link and being able to send someone that link is pretty nice. Definitely would have been useful a few years ago for me.

agreed.

Guess I'm nit-picking on the term "file sharing" and personally would classify this more like "file exchange".
I must have spent too much time with file server systems :giggle: