Transferring big files has never been easy
After all email providers usually limit email attachment sizes to something around 10-15mb, even if your provider allows larger files to be sent the chances are your recipients email provider wont.
What if you need to send files of 1 or 2 gigabytes?
Email is definitely a no no, but today there are so many services ideal for sending large files, and most of them are free, (or have free versions)
Windows SkyDrive
Offers 25 gigabytes of online storage, allowing you to share files with anyone, maximum 50mb file size upload limit.
Drop Box
Free account offers 2 gigabytes, you can pay for more storage, and you also get an extra 500 megabytes each time you recommend someone, up to a limit of 16 gigabytes.
Files uploaded via the website are limited to 300 megabytes, but unlimited via the desktop application (unlimited up to the size of your Dropbox account)
Unlike most of these services Dropbox does differ, as where most services store everything solely online Dropbox stores it online, but also creates local copies of the files, this means it’s easy to work on your files while not connected to the internet, and the next time you connect it automatically syncs the changed files, this is one reason why Dropbox is currently our favorite.
A Drive
50 gigabytes of online storage, 2 gigabyte file upload limit (free version does have advertising)
Windows File Sharing
Windows offers built in file sharing, if you need to share files with anyone on your network sharing this way is very easy and secure.
Tips
Transferring big files not only takes up space, but if your internet connection has a slow upload speed you could be spending a lot of time sending large files, in this case consider compressing files before sending, this will allow the file to be sent fast, won’t take up as much space and will be quicker to download onto any other computer.
The most common compressed format is a zip file and Windows has this built in, other compression formats include, rar, 7z and arj.
Ensure that anyone receiving large files can open them if they are compressed.
To run this right click on the file or folder you wish to compress and select Add to Zip File, this will create a zip file with the same name as the original.
Think about image formats, try using a compressed image format such as JPG, GIF, PNG etc, if you have PDF or PowerPoint documents optimize the images, this can reduce the size tenfold.
After all no one likes to get unnecessarily large files which will only take up more space on a computer’s hard drive.
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