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Ask HN: What is your favorite method of sending large files?

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Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite method of sending large files?

#181

Post by tbronchain »

It doesn't have to be large files, file sharing sucks. Even copy/past across devices, even your own devices, is a pain. How many times did I email myself some links to share them across devices. And I'm not even speaking about sharing pictures with people not very accustomed to technology (in other words, don't try to get them install a cloud storage app).

I gave that question a few tries but I feel part of the problem is the market being saturated by giants doing half the job. Another part of it is the lack of interoperability regarding file sharing between operating systems. I mean - a native right click>send to>user - native notification to the user with a solution to direct p2p download from that person. No software needed, seemless integration. Why is that so hard?

I really wish the big boys would give that a try rather than giving us toy-like features and price bump.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite method of sending large files?

#183

Post by boring_twenties »

rjeli wrote: post #100
geocrasher wrote: post #57

5GB on my local network: Windows File Share, Rsync, or HTTP depending on source/destination 5GB on Internet: Upload to my OVH VPS and HTTP or Rsync it to its destination 10TB, local or Internet: Physical Hard Drive. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes! https://www.tidbitsfortechs.com/2013/09/never-underestimate-... And since you now buy 1TB micro SD cards, so perhaps I'd split th…

Since credit cards go through the mail, I assume you can send SDs in an envelope for a few cents, right? Fast and cheap. Although this anecdote says USPS radiation scanning might wipe it, anyone have experience? https://www.thewanderinglensman.com/2014/01/warning-dont-mai...

> USPS radiation scanning might wipe it

I'm skeptical of this, since when I order microSD cards online they arrive via USPS and have a perfectly valid partition table and FAT filesystem on them.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite method of sending large files?

#184

Post by StavrosK »

tbronchain wrote: post #181

It doesn't have to be large files, file sharing sucks. Even copy/past across devices, even your own devices, is a pain. How many times did I email myself some links to share them across devices. And I'm not even speaking about sharing pictures with people not very accustomed to technology (in other words, don't try to get them install a cloud storage app). I gave that question a few tries but I feel part of the probl…

You're gonna love magic-wormhole.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite method of sending large files?

#185

Post by StavrosK »

lowwave wrote: post #64
mullen wrote: post #45

If the data is below 50G in size and on my personal computer, then I just drop it into the Google Drive folder and it syncs to Google over night. When it is done, I export it and then send a link to the person(s). I pay $2 a month for the 100G account and I usually have about 50G disk space unused, so this is not an issue for me. If it is above 50G and on my personal computer, I encrypt the data and then physically m…

>If it is on a server (For example, a side project instance in AWS), then I drop it into S3 bucket, export it and send the URL to the recipient. I just eat the cost of them downloading it. Usually I am making money off the work anyways, so it is the cost of doing business. Consider BunnyCDN way cheaper than s3.

BunnyCDN is a CloudFront alternative, not an S3 alternative.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite method of sending large files?

#186

Post by spurgu »

theobeers wrote: post #69
kvn_95 wrote: post #2

Magic Wormhole ( https://magic-wormhole.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ ) if it's between OSes. Between OSX, AirDrop works very well. I have sent >10GB files between Macs, quite quick as well. I have never send a 10TB file so I wouldn't know. None of my drives are that large yet :)

Magic Wormhole is good. These days I use croc,[0] which I find even better. [0]: https://github.com/schollz/croc

I don't see an option to send text (browsed through README and Issues), is this not possible with croc? With Magic Wormhole it's the default to get a message prompt when running "wormhole send". Or you can do it as a oneliner with "wormhole send --text 'something'". Wormhole William can do this as well IIRC.

I use MWH often for sending stuff like URL's, passwords, API keys... having to create a file for that is quite annoying (and remembering to delete it afterwards).

"brew install magic-wormhole" or "sudo apt-get install magic-wormhole" is easy enough and I don't hang around with people who use Windows. ;)

Resumable file transfers sound like a great feature though. Not sure it's implementable with MWH the way it now works.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite method of sending large files?

#187

Post by itake »

anderspitman wrote: post #158
itake wrote: post #110

You can create a simple python http server to expose files in a directory to the local web: $ python -m http.server 8000 and then you can start ngrok to expose the file $ ngrok http 8000 that will give you an URL to share with whoever wants it.

Does ngrok limit data at all or just connections?

I’ve sent a few GB over this method using their free service. Doesn’t seem to have a transfer limit

https://ngrok.com/pricing

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite method of sending large files?

#189

Post by johnisgood »

libertine wrote: post #96
livueta wrote: post #86

Bittorrent. No, really. Lots of nice behaviors when transferring large amounts of data between arbitrary endpoints. Transferring the torrent metadata is pretty trivial and can be done via a wide range of methods, and having that flexibility can be nice. Unlike HTTP, you get reasonable retry behavior on network hiccups. Also, more robust data integrity guarantees, though a manual hash test is probably a good idea eith…

Sometimes I wonder if the bad connotation due to piracy made this protocol not standard (in a sense, that's not widely adopted, and people need dedicated clients, instead of it working for example in browsers). I don't know enough, maybe it has security issues, or some limits... but the fact is that it's still widely used, by tech literate people, so it still stands the test of time and it must be doing something rig…

Probably, but it is quite a neat technology. As people in this industry, we know what else it is being used for, and it serves those purposes pretty well. I love torrents. I love the technologies that it uses. Many other projects use it, for example take a look at https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/dht and https://github.com/savoirfairelinux/opendht just for DHT alone. There is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_URI_scheme. There are many more, just too lazy to find them at the moment, but believe me, the things you will encounter once you go down this road, is truly amazing. Worth it!

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite method of sending large files?

#190

Post by vbezhenar »

mc10 wrote: post #163
3s wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebTorrent [1] can be used to run BitTorrent on the web. It's actually integrated into the Brave browser which is a nice feature. Other browsers might catch on soon. [1] https://webtorrent.io/

WebTorrent is pretty limited though: > ... a browser-based WebTorrent client or "web peer" can only connect to other clients that support WebTorrent/WebRTC. (from https://webtorrent.io/faq ) This essentially splinters the world into the bittorrent and webtorrent halves, which makes it far less useful.

For some reason browser vendors do not allow JavaScript to connect to any port. So there's no other way.
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