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up vote 5 down vote favorite

I have 3 files, 9 GB each. There are some personal videos that I need to send to my brother in Italy. I'm looking for a free, fast way to send them over. My upload speed isn't that good and I could send them with HFS, but it doesn't have a resume option in case my/his internet connection disconnects.

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Thank for your idea with uTorrent Tom but I have a Dynamic IP I don't really know how could I do that. – ChristianM Sep 17 '09 at 17:09

10 Answers

up vote 14 down vote accepted

You could also use the Bit Torrent protocol to send them over. If only you and he have the torrent files, no one else can get the files from you. Something like uTorrent would be great, and you both can just leave your machines running while you're doing other things, no real interaction required once started.

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Bittorrent should eliminate problems with resume. – pelms Sep 17 '09 at 16:45
Good idea. When I create the new .torrent what do I add to the Trackers ? – ChristianM Sep 17 '09 at 16:56
I wish I could give you some trackers to add, but bit torrent stuff is blocked at my office here. A google search for "bit torrent trackers list" resulted in some good results. Try the first one at torrentking.org. I doubt you'll need more than one or two. – Tom Sep 17 '09 at 18:04
I managed to make uTorrent work. Thank all of you for the answers ! – ChristianM Sep 18 '09 at 12:23
Regarding "If only you and he have the torrent files, no one else can get the files from you"... how safe is this guarantee that it couldn't be intercepted by someone without the torrent file? – Pacerier Jul 13 '12 at 18:13
up vote 27 down vote

You really should consider using a mail service. It's not free, but it's a lot faster; you could just burn all the data to 3 double layer DVDs and mail them.

It would probably take a lot of time to upload 27GB of data.

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1  
+1, snail mail still does have its uses. :) – Molly7244 Sep 17 '09 at 17:15
agree, depending on the size of data it can easily beat xDSL :) – T. Kaltnekar Sep 17 '09 at 17:25
2  
I was thinking "Put it on a memory card or USB drive and ship it". I guess burning a DVD counts. A small memory card might fit into "regular letter" postage rates whereas a DVD might not. – Mr. Shiny and New 安宇 Sep 17 '09 at 17:54
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+1 - in the immortal words of somebody or other: 'never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes' – ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells Sep 17 '09 at 18:19
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up vote 4 down vote

Transmitting 27GB of data over slow upload/download links will take a long time. If you have 80kBps upload speed (that's the common upload speed here in Ontario) you're looking at 90+ hours to upload it all, assuming uninterrupted transfers. If you have to upload it somewhere else and only when it's uploaded can he download it, you're adding more latency. My preference in this case would be to use snail-mail; some 8GB memory cards are about $15 and you could mail them for about $2 (from Ontario to Italy, your prices will vary). If you mailed some DVDs it might be even cheaper for the media but would be more for the postage.

Another option would be to zip up the movies and then split the files into hundreds of small chunks; you could then simply email these chunks one at a time to your brother. Once he has all the chunks he can re-assemble the zip files and then unzip them. Offhand I don't know of a windows program that does this (well, pkzip used to be able to do this, I'm sure there are lots of zip tools that can also do this) but in Linux you can achieve this with tar, which can make fixed-size archives (originally for tape-backup purposes). Email isn't the best tool for this purpose, and this approach is full of drawbacks, but it can get the job done using a program everybody has.

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What email service are you suggesting using? Most of the free email services prohibit certain file types, zip files often included. Even if the email does allow it, their servers need to be able to look into the zip file contents to check for viruses and if they can't it will refuse to send. Splitting files could make the contents unrecognizable to these tools resulting in you being unable to send it. – AlanSE Jul 20 '12 at 2:36
@AlanSE If a certain free webmail service doesn't work for you just find one that does. I would just use my ISP's email for this purpose. But in 2012 I would recommend a service like Dropbox or Google Drive, though you still might need to split the file into multiple pieces and do them one at a time, or use multiple dropbox accounts. – Mr. Shiny and New 安宇 Jul 20 '12 at 12:35
up vote 2 down vote

I was gonna suggest just putting them on a cheap external drive and then mailing it...but then I saw you said Italy, which is known to have one of the worst postal systems ever. So even with a slow transfer speed it'll probably be faster than mailing. Only thing I can recommend is to use something like RAR to split the files apart in advance, then if the connection fails you only need to restart a small part instead of a huge multi-GB file.

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up vote 2 down vote

*if you are going to spilt the 3 files into smaller pieces ( using hjSpilt,winrar,etc) then I suggest you also use quickpar to build some recovery files. that way, a few pieces may be lost, but you can still recover the larger files.

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up vote 1 down vote

Compress/split then into smaller parts and use a free service such as http://drop.io

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up vote 1 down vote

Try signing up to Microsoft Mesh.

If you put the three files into a directory and set this to share, then it should synchronise the directory directly to your brothers machine when you are both online.

If you are going to be online at separate times, you may want to take a look at hjsplit, with this you can split the file into many smaller pieces and again, using Mesh, you can synchronise it to the online "desktop" as they give you 5GB free storage. You will have to do a little at a time, but it should get done.

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up vote 1 down vote

hmm. with a web server that supports resume (xampp or xitami - which seems perfect for this), you could use wget (there's a windows version) with the -c switch to have a resumable download. Naturally chunk it up into smaller pieces and compress itso he dosen't have to download any single larger file, and you should be good.

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up vote 0 down vote

I agree with alex that mailing the files is better.

In case you don't want that and you have patience to upload the files you can use
TeamViewer which is free and supports file transfering (and a lot more features).

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up vote 0 down vote

32GB thumb drive and depending on what it is you may want to encrypt it. 9GB sounds like movies either way good luck.

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