Share Large and Bulky Files Over the Internet

We sometimes have to share a large file with someone over the internet, to do so there are normally two options –

• You can either attach the files to an email message or
• If the files are too big to fit in an email program, you can upload them to an online storage service and then share the download links with the recipient.

But there are some of the popular services that will help us to transfer files over the internet without any difficulty, overheads or costs.

• Share Large Files over Email

Gmail does not hold good for email attachments that are larger than 25 MB but the recently-renovated Hotmail is a much better alternative as it lets you send email messages as large as 10 GB.
The maximum size of an individual file that you can attach to a Hotmail message is only 50 MB but you can use a file-splitting utility like HJ-Split to break a big file into smaller chunks and then attach them all to a single message. The recipient can then join these chunks to restore the original file and he can do without requiring external programs.

• Share Large Files without Email

The main drawback with email attachments is obvious – most ISPs and web-based email programs (including Gmail) will reject incoming messages that have big attachments and therefore, if you try sending a bulky file via email, the recipients also have to be on Hotmail as well in order to receive that file.

One of the best options for sharing large files without email is Dropbox. Once you install the Dropbox utility on your (Windows, Mac or Linux) desktop, you can upload files of virtually any size to the Internet – it’s only limited by the size of your Dropbox storage which is 2GB in the case of free accounts. But if you don’t want to install Dropbox, you can upload files directly to the Dropbox website from your browser but the limit in this case is 300 MB per file.

You can even use Google Docs to share those big files over the Internet. Google Docs lets you upload files up to 250 MB in size and they can be in any format. If you have 1 GB of free storage space for storing all the non-Office files on Google Docs it is good but you can also buy some more space.

Unlike FTP servers, services like Google Docs and Dropbox doesn’t support resume able download. That means if the connection breaks while the recipient is still trying to download your “huge” file, he or she will have to resume the download from scratch.

• SkyDrive, which is a part of the Windows Live, can solve this problem.

The service offers 25 GB of free online storage, with individual files limited to 50 MB. To upload a large file, split it into chunks of 50 MB each and then upload them all to a single folder on SkyDrive. The recipient can download the entire folder as a ZIP or, if he’s on a slow connection, he can download files one by one and then join them all at his end.

• Share Files Without any Registration

Now if you are looking for something quick that is fast and simple and doesn’t even need a registration process, talk to YouSendIT or WeTransfer just in the case if the file size is really big. Upload the files with the help browser, enter the email address of the recipient and click on send. WeTransfer lets you send files up to 2 GB in size while the maximum allowed limit is 100 MB in the case of YouSendIt (free version).