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
Syncthing
Er, wait, are you using Syncthing for its intended purpose of syncing files across devices on your local network? And then exposing that infrastructure to the internet? Or are you isolating Syncthing instances?
Syncthing is not limited to local network. It’s hole punching is one of the major features
My largest file transfer I have done via USB disk. You simply don’t transfer multiple terabytes over the net.
I really like Wormhole for this exact purpose.
I’d have to have friends across the internet that wanted files first…
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.
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.
Super easy. Spin up an OpenVPN server, forwarding the right ports to your server. Now spin up an Apache server with the folder your file’s in as server root. Send the client config for your VPN to your friend, along with the local address of your HTTP server. Now they can install the OpenVPN client on their PC and download the file from your HTTP server. Once you’re done, tear down all your servers, and don’t forget to unforward the ports. Couldn’t be easier.
/s
I have non-ironically gotten responses like this
Okay can you explain why thats a sarcastic answer? Is one of those first three steps way harder than I think it is?
Cause that’s not simple or easy at all. It takes a fair bit of knowledge to set up all of these things.
Me and my friend used netcat to transfer 30 GB of files put into a zip. Very fun, would not recommend
I use an ancient HTTP File Server program called HFS from Rejetto. Very light weight. Supports making user accounts and whatnot if you want.
I usually just turn it on for a transfer and don’t leave it up these days, but still comes in handy on occasion.
HFSv2 (the windows exe) has publically known unfixed vulnerabilities! Please upgrade to HFSv3 (nodejs, crossplatform). I’m also maintaining a list of other alternatives; https://github.com/9001/copyparty/blob/hovudstraum/docs/versus.md
Thanks!
