Sending Big Files
Since the dawn of time, human beings have longed to share their experiences with other people and created such notable inventions as writing, printing, the telegraph, the telephone and now the internet to do just that.
There was a time when waiting for months, sometimes years, to be able to share information was acceptable and pretty much a normal expectation.
Now, in a world of instant communications, right now isn’t fast enough and just about everything that happens to us is shared globally on the Internet.
In keeping with the growing amount of documentation that we’re generating, the computer industry and most notably, the hard drive manufacturers have responded to this growing need for additional storage at reasonable prices.
For example, I just received an e-mail advertising a 2 TB hard drive for $59 and I carry a 4 GB flash drive on my key ring.
Coming from a world where I started with the original Apple II computer and thought that 64K of memory and 143K of storage on a floppy disk was marvelous, 2 TB seems almost inconceivable.
And yet, with all of the audio, video, and photographs that we create and send, the amount of data that we create, store, and send, has grown exponentially.
As noted by the advertisement I received, inexpensive storage is easy to achieve but sharing large files with other people via the Internet presents something of a challenge.
Although you can send a lot of text with an e-mail (because text takes very little room), when you start to expand to graphics, photographs, PowerPoint™ presentations, audio, and especially video, you start to run into a size limitation as to what most standard e-mail will allow you to attach.
Most of the e-mail programs limit the size of attachments anywhere between 2 MB and 10 MB which is great until you start to get into audio, video and big picture files and then you have a problem.
Because we own and operate a publishing company, we see this problem constantly as deal with authors who tend to include a lot of large files containing everything from charts, graphs, PowerPoint™ presentations, and more specifically, very detailed high-resolution photographs, all of which present an overall size problem when attaching it to e-mail.
When you couple that with the finished formatted books including full color covers that we send back and forth for reviews and revisions, and we start to run into a size problem very rapidly.
The good news is that with everything in technology these days, if enough people voice a concern, one or more organizations will develop a solution and that’s exactly what’s happened for sharing large files.
The earliest solution to this problem was to store everything on your own website and give the e-mail recipient a link to download.
Another technique involves FTP File Transfers but although these are both wonderful solutions, they’re well beyond the technical capability of most people especially if they have a simple website or if you’re having somebody else maintain your site for you.
You can use an online uploading service and link to them through email. There are some file hosting sites that allow free upload and link to those files like Flicker™ and YouTube™ but the only drawback is that anybody who finds out the link can access those files if it’s a public search site.
What actually makes a lot more sense is use a third-party service that will allow you to use the electronic equivalent of a bus locker to store your material and then send the recipient a link to it so they can download the material for themselves.
Having used the services many times, I can tell you that they are extremely convenient and take the trepidation out of offering to share something that you created with somebody else especially if it’s something proprietary.
Although there are a lot of different services around, I’m going to recommend that you use the ones that I’ve outlined below because they’ll let you do a certain amount of store-and-forward work for free.
Then, if you find that this is really valuable to you, it’ll be worth your while to spend a few dollars each month to sign up for their fee services.
Look closely at your projected usage and actual costs. The pricing plans are not always as obvious as they seem and you might end up buying a lot more capabilities than you need.
ServiceURLFreeFEENotesPandowww.Pando.com1 GigNAAd supported serviceSend This Filewww.Sendthisfile.com2 Gig$50 per yearFree service has monthly limitsYou Send Itwww.yousendit.com2 Gig$50 per yearFree service has monthly limitsDrop Sendwww.dropsend.com2 Gig$50 per yearFree service has a 5 send per month limitTransfer Big Fileswww.TransferBigFiles.com100 MB per file$7 per month
2 gigs per file
1,000 downloads per file
Free service limits are 20 downloads per fileAbout these ads
There was a time when waiting for months, sometimes years, to be able to share information was acceptable and pretty much a normal expectation.
Now, in a world of instant communications, right now isn’t fast enough and just about everything that happens to us is shared globally on the Internet.
In keeping with the growing amount of documentation that we’re generating, the computer industry and most notably, the hard drive manufacturers have responded to this growing need for additional storage at reasonable prices.
For example, I just received an e-mail advertising a 2 TB hard drive for $59 and I carry a 4 GB flash drive on my key ring.
Coming from a world where I started with the original Apple II computer and thought that 64K of memory and 143K of storage on a floppy disk was marvelous, 2 TB seems almost inconceivable.
And yet, with all of the audio, video, and photographs that we create and send, the amount of data that we create, store, and send, has grown exponentially.
As noted by the advertisement I received, inexpensive storage is easy to achieve but sharing large files with other people via the Internet presents something of a challenge.
Although you can send a lot of text with an e-mail (because text takes very little room), when you start to expand to graphics, photographs, PowerPoint™ presentations, audio, and especially video, you start to run into a size limitation as to what most standard e-mail will allow you to attach.
Most of the e-mail programs limit the size of attachments anywhere between 2 MB and 10 MB which is great until you start to get into audio, video and big picture files and then you have a problem.
Because we own and operate a publishing company, we see this problem constantly as deal with authors who tend to include a lot of large files containing everything from charts, graphs, PowerPoint™ presentations, and more specifically, very detailed high-resolution photographs, all of which present an overall size problem when attaching it to e-mail.
When you couple that with the finished formatted books including full color covers that we send back and forth for reviews and revisions, and we start to run into a size problem very rapidly.
The good news is that with everything in technology these days, if enough people voice a concern, one or more organizations will develop a solution and that’s exactly what’s happened for sharing large files.
The earliest solution to this problem was to store everything on your own website and give the e-mail recipient a link to download.
Another technique involves FTP File Transfers but although these are both wonderful solutions, they’re well beyond the technical capability of most people especially if they have a simple website or if you’re having somebody else maintain your site for you.
You can use an online uploading service and link to them through email. There are some file hosting sites that allow free upload and link to those files like Flicker™ and YouTube™ but the only drawback is that anybody who finds out the link can access those files if it’s a public search site.
What actually makes a lot more sense is use a third-party service that will allow you to use the electronic equivalent of a bus locker to store your material and then send the recipient a link to it so they can download the material for themselves.
Having used the services many times, I can tell you that they are extremely convenient and take the trepidation out of offering to share something that you created with somebody else especially if it’s something proprietary.
Although there are a lot of different services around, I’m going to recommend that you use the ones that I’ve outlined below because they’ll let you do a certain amount of store-and-forward work for free.
Then, if you find that this is really valuable to you, it’ll be worth your while to spend a few dollars each month to sign up for their fee services.
Look closely at your projected usage and actual costs. The pricing plans are not always as obvious as they seem and you might end up buying a lot more capabilities than you need.
ServiceURLFreeFEENotesPandowww.Pando.com1 GigNAAd supported serviceSend This Filewww.Sendthisfile.com2 Gig$50 per yearFree service has monthly limitsYou Send Itwww.yousendit.com2 Gig$50 per yearFree service has monthly limitsDrop Sendwww.dropsend.com2 Gig$50 per yearFree service has a 5 send per month limitTransfer Big Fileswww.TransferBigFiles.com100 MB per file$7 per month
2 gigs per file
1,000 downloads per file
Free service limits are 20 downloads per fileAbout these ads
