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Comment by 40four | Hacker News Reader

I started using Firefox Send recently, I have been really impressed with the simplicity and easy of use. I haven’t tried it, but it is open source and possible to self-host if you so chose. But for the time being it remains free, and you can share up to a generous 2.5 GB if you log in with a Firefox account so I see no reason to put in the effort yet.

That being said, Sharedrop seems to be a different use case, only sharing file between folks on the same network. I applaud the effort, I will certainly like to try this out soon!

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Meanwhile, I found the 2.5 GB limit on Firefox Send really frustrating this weekend when I was trying to send 80 GB of raw video files to a friend. :)

Turns out there's very few options available for really large P2P file transfers, short of hosting an FTP server.

For 80gb I would send a usb pen via mail

I regularly send 200gb with Resilio Sync, but before sending the file I split into 10gb pieces and on the other side I put them together.

why not use a regular old torrent?

Curious, couldn't you have used a torrent for that?

Great question! I considered it, but I wasn't able to find a clear answer whether it was secure or not. If somebody had access to the tracker backend or were inspecting the DHT traffic, would they be able to download the files without the original .torrent file?

(Most of the BitTorrent docs assume you're intending to distribute the files publicly.)

Not that the data was really worth protecting — it was just GoPro videos from a recent ski trip. But still, I didn't want to share my (unedited) home movies publicly.

Maybe you can try Resilio Sync (was named BT Sync before) https://www.resilio.com/individuals/#plans

I am not sure if Free version supports limited sharing But I guess you can open a folder for your one-time use then remove it afterward

Did you consider encryption? Issue is that it adds one step at the start and at the end, which probably isn't negligible on 80gb of data.

Well, you could use a private tracker/one that doesn't dump it's torrent-list publicly, and mark the torrent file itself as private, so your client won't share it on the DHT. Also, encrypting is orthogonal.

Then find yourself shocked when the far end's torrent client ignores the private setting?

Which doesn't really happen, because all those private invite-only trackers hand out perma-bans for that.

So a good chunk of users will get really angry if a client comes with that bug. I haven't yet even found a way to make any ignore this.

Disclosure, I work at Dropbox: but did you consider paying for a tool? Or were you mostly interested in free options?

I tried uploading the archive to iCloud, but the server rejected it as too large. None of my other cloud storage accounts had enough free space.

Paying for extra space seemed overkill, given that this was literally a one-time P2P file transfer. I really should just be able to send a file to another IP address without having to pay for storage somewhere.

This works _really_ well: https://github.com/warner/magic-wormhole

This was spotted on HN 3 weeks ago: https://github.com/schollz/croc

Would rsync have worked? A bit of googling gives this as the best set of answers I can find

https://serverfault.com/questions/53531/copy-large-file-from...

Sorry to keep bike shedding this!

OP was talking about the generous 2.5 GB limit, while you're referring to the stingy 2.5 GB limit.

Indeed, that's why I posted. I found it to be an interesting juxtaposition. :)

Haha, well it is hosted free on their servers. I guess I thought it was nice compared to the 1gb you get free on Dropbox.

Very much related to the sister comment that recommended resilio sync, I usually tell people to install the free (but equally good) synthing when I want to transfer very large files in private. I have it running anyways, and it's not too big of a hassle to install for them. It has the added benefit that you can abort and resume the transfer at any point, which is especially useful if you're transferring from some noisy machine that you want to turn off during the night.

Actually, torrents are still kinda a go-to for p2p transfers.

There is a new tool around which can be used to send large files p2p with end to end encryption (I'm the developer behind it).

No mobile app yet but it already works on macOS, Windows and Linux.

cryo file manager

https://cryonet.io

Setup a syncthing folder share with your friend.

Drop your 80gb in the folder

Data syncs over p2p e2ee overnight.

Friend removes the copy from their sync folder and it vanishes from yours

This exact use case - sharing many GB of raw movies and pictures - is solved really well by Resilio Sync.

https://www.resilio.com/individuals/

As it is open source you can always just run a new docker of Send, tweak the ENV variable for max file size and bobs your uncle.

https://send.mirorauhala.fi/

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