Sharing Large Files

The Situation

This morning a coworker was trying to send a video file (184MB) to a friend on AOL. He kept getting it kicked back as exceeding the file limit. Once, he showed me what the problem was, I explained to him that AOL has a limit on the size of files that can be received, 25MB according to the following link accessed at about 10:30am http://help.aol.com/help/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=219091&sliceId=1&docTypeID=DT_AOLFAQS_1_1&dialogID=156350508&stateId=1%200%20156370583.

I told him that I would let him know about a free service to share such a large file when I went on my break, as I remembered seeing something about sharing large files just the other day when I was checking out my Google Reader RSS feeds.

Sure enough I found the 06JUL10 post "Easily Share Large Files over the Internet" on the Digital Inspiration blog's feed (http://feeds.labnol.org/labnol ).

The Solution

I sent the post's link to my coworker, and once we read through the post, we decided to try WeTransfer, as it requires no registration and can handle files up to 2GB.

We went to the site and followed the instructions given. It took only a couple of minutes to figure out how to use it, but the upload time for the 184MB video file took about twenty minutes on a T1 line. I would guess that the long upload time is due to this being a free service with a lot of users. It sent a confirmation email to him upon completion of the uploading, and says it will send another confirmation once the recipient downloads the file.

Files are available for two weeks only, so make sure that when you use this service the person(s) you are sharing with are aware of that fact.

Conclusion

The Digital Inspiration post had other suggestions, which we did not try, so check it out yourself, in case you might need to share a file that is too big for your or your recipients email to handle.

What free file sharing service do you use for this kind of situation? Leave a comment and let me know.