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?
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.
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.
Not sure if this works for you but I didnt see it mentioned. I use plex for my media server, so I would just put whatever it is on there and then someone else can log in remotely and download it through the app on their mobile, and I think also via the website too.
I know this works if the person is downloading from android but haven’t tested otherwise.
That should work for media files at least, but I believe they’ll also need Plex pass to be able to download anything.
Should be able to do that with Jellyfin, no Plex/Plex Pass needed (if you really want to use media software for this).
That said I suspect your current method with creating a torrent to share is much more resilient when dealing with choppy internet connections. With Jellyfin/Plex it’s more of a direct download situation, not sure if either can resume broken downloads.
Reminds me I had been needing to find something for this too. Looks like I had thought about using Croc.
I’ve used:
But for slower connections bittorrent is the best option by far because it doesn’t care about interruptions, and verifies the data as it goes. Just gotta make sure you’re port forwarding the client.
