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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?

#281
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox Send doesn’t work anymore

That's unfortunate. That was my go-to method. From https://send.firefox.com/ : "Firefox Send is temporarily unavailable while we work on product improvements. We appreciate your patience while we make the Firefox Send experience better."

I wonder how temporary it is because it’s been saying that for a couple months already. I think that service is dead.

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

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish the downvoters would explain what's wrong with the parent comment, as the counter-arguments raised by parliament32 seem completely reasonable to me. Perhaps it's just the length of the comment, and they would prefer it written up as a blog post somewhere.

Don't worry, this is normal for HN. As a commenter higher up said, "People without experience come around and think they can replace an old tool with a better one". People tend to like thinking along the lines of "surely old things must be bad" and you'll get met with disagree-downvotes anytime you try to explain why you want old software in fields like crypto or internet routing. Try defending BGP in any of the DDOS…

> People without experience come around and think they can replace an old tool with a better one

Just for posterity, the tool linked above that everyone is discussing here was written by the Go Lead Dev for cryptography and security at Google.

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

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also pipe through gpg if you want encryption along the way!

And through gzip/zstd/etc if you want compression!

And through tac if you want it in reverse!

(...And my axe!)

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

#285
post #179
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…

Just be careful - unless you mark that torrent private it'll get posted to the DHT and crawlers like BtDig will pick it up and list it publicly. For this reason I prefer using something like Syncthing which is designed more with this purpose in mind.

For some reason I haven’t understood, syncthing would often miss transferring files but mark the entire transfer/sync as complete. No errors in the logs either. I tried it for a few months earlier this year, then gave up and switched to plain rsync in a shell. Based on that sample of one personal experience, I wouldn’t recommend syncthing to anyone.

Note: I was using syncthing for a one way sync all the time, with send-only and receive-only settings on the endpoints.

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

#288
There are many ways of sending big files over the Internet, so I will go into the top three, save time. The first one is the shortest, when using Gmail. Click on the drive button instead, rather than just the paper clip button you will be using with regular attachments. It provides an outline of your drive files, from which you can pick the file to import. Just as easy.

You should go to another cloud computing provider if you don't like Google Drive.

My third alternative is even more easy, but it's a little sluggish because it cuts you at two gigs either way. It is a service called WeTransfer, which was almost your only choice 15 years ago if you had to submit a huge file.

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

#290
If it's a file less than 10 GB I will use my own website: https://pixeldrain.com. For things slightly larger I will split it up using 7zip and use pixeldrain too.

For much larger files I always fall back to BitTorrent. I have also kept an eye on WebWormhole, but haven't been in a situation yet where I needed it.

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