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’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.
openvpn and apache can be very time consuming to set up if you do it for the first time
i like zipline but i use it for smaller files where download resumability is not a key factor
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.
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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
My largest file transfer I have done via USB disk. You simply don’t transfer multiple terabytes over the net.
I tell them to start their Nextcloud client. Or if they don’t have it, give them the share link.
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.
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.
Same, always eorked great for me
I’ve use Plik before with success.
I really like Wormhole for this exact purpose.
Just share the folder on soulseek. Probably not advisable for any sensitive information though xD
Nextcloud is great for this
wormholeis good; also its CLI.Wormhole or croc
