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
I really like Wormhole for this exact purpose.
Nextcloud is great for this
You can OnionShare if you’re worried about privacy.
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
Me and my friend used netcat to transfer 30 GB of files put into a zip. Very fun, would not recommend
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.
Create share links allowing anyone with the link (+ optional password) to browse and download individual files, or whole folder contents.
If someone needs to send me a file, I can create a user for them in a few seconds; so they can upload to that as well.
I’d have to have friends across the internet that wanted files first…
Friends I know IRL: Thumbdrives.
Friends I only know via the Internet: Torrents or IRC filesharing.
Though knowing that a homing pigeon with a thumb drive is actually faster than the fastest Internet network on the planet, maybe I should simply invest in a coop and some pigeons. 🤔
Though knowing that a homing pigeon with a thumb drive is actually faster than the fastest Internet network on the planet
Depends on how big the flash drive is, I suppose. Need to send a 1GB file? Just make a torrent. Need to send 40TB? Yeah, that hard drive is getting driven across town.
Perhaps two pigeons could carry the hard drive on a string. I’ve heard tell of swallows that have done this with coconuts.
Exactly what kind of pigeons are we talking about here? Or would you recommend switching to an avian variant of the migratory type?
I’d recommend either an african or european swallow.
I’ve use Plik before with success.
I used vaultwarden just the other day for this purpose. I mean, I use vaultwarden daily as a password manager, but it also has secure file transfer.
If its a file from my seedbox: Direct share link (optional pw)
Local file: OneDriveI 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…
I’d go for syncthing over nextcloud for your specific usecase. Nextcloud isn’t good for unreliable connections and they’re sticking with the annoying decision of not supporting server to server synchronization.
