Personal computing discussed

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meerkt
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Free file hosts with decent storage capacity?

Sat Apr 22, 2017 8:37 am

Recently I needed to transfer a few GBs to people over the internet. It's surprisingly difficult to find free file/storage hosts with enough storage capacity, and that actually work. I wanted to avoid Google, though it seems they're almost the only game in town?

Ultimately the best I found, which still leaves some to be desired, is:
MediaFire
Pros: 10GB storage, 1GB (or more) files allowed, decent GUI.
Cons: No direct download links to files (but harmless enough download pages), limited speeds? (not sure if my location/ISP are to blame).

Others I've tried:

4shared
Pros: 15GB storage, 1GB (or more) files allowed, decent GUI.
Cons: Couldn't find a way to download without being logged in (despites a "wait 20 seconds" box which suggests otherwise), ad-ridden file download pages, harsh download limits (3GB per day, 30GB per month).

ByteDropper
Pros: Supposedly 20GB storage, 1GB (or more) files allowed.
Cons: Couldn't download my test file, it just stopped in the middle on all browsers I've tried. And the server doesn't send the file size when you start downloading, so something definitely looks fishy. Site looks fishy in general. Super-barebones, with no company info, no contact info, no help pages, nothing. Makes me wonder if it's an email collection honeytrap.

DropBox
Pros: 1GB (or more) files allowed
Cons: Only 2GB storage, slow uploading (can't rule out it's related to location/ISP), file list on the web doesn't show file sizes, web upload time remaining is rounded to hours (when <60min remaining)

BTW, all of them don't show you the upload speed, which I find annoying.
Last edited by meerkt on Mon Apr 24, 2017 3:12 pm, edited 4 times in total.
 
blahsaysblah
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Re: Free file hosts with decent storage capacity?

Sat Apr 22, 2017 9:24 am

If you have Windows 10 Pro, enable "Windows 10 Subsystem for Linux", both OpenSSH client and server packages are installed by default.
Pros: free, capacity is equal to your HDD/SSD storage
Cons: might have to mess with port forwarding/static ip on router to get PC/SSH server online. Limited by your ISPs upload rate. Setup ufw to rate limit connections to ssh server.
 
SoM
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Re: Free file hosts with decent storage capacity?

Sat Apr 22, 2017 10:10 am

mediafire.com
10gb free 4gb/file
50gb free with bonuses, don't know what this is ads maybe

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Flying Fox
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Re: Free file hosts with decent storage capacity?

Sat Apr 22, 2017 12:08 pm

OneDrive is 5 gigs free.

Box.com is 10gigs free, but 250MB per file limit (meaning you have to use multi-part zip/rar/7z to break stuff up).

Ninja: Mega.nz (of Kim Dotcom fame) is 50gigs free too.
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Duct Tape Dude
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Re: Free file hosts with decent storage capacity?

Sat Apr 22, 2017 12:25 pm

What about syncing software like Resilio Sync?
 
meerkt
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Re: Free file hosts with decent storage capacity?

Sat Apr 22, 2017 12:50 pm

I don't want to self-host (in cases that I do I'd use HFS).

The problem with Mega is their annoying non-standard downloading. Or do they offer now plain HTTP downloading?

My impression was that Resilio can't be uploaded to from a browser. And can you give out plain HTTP download links?
 
Flying Fox
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Re: Free file hosts with decent storage capacity?

Sat Apr 22, 2017 2:03 pm

meerkt wrote:
The problem with Mega is their annoying non-standard downloading. Or do they offer now plain HTTP downloading?

Beggars can't be choosers. You want huge capacity, then you have to live with it. You don't need the special client anymore. Just straight up browser (at least on Chrome) would do. If you are talking plain HTTP/HTTPS where you are using automated tools like wget or your own app, well, you are in the advanced users territory and should really be paying.
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curtisb
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Re: Free file hosts with decent storage capacity?

Sat Apr 22, 2017 3:04 pm

Flying Fox wrote:
OneDrive is 5 gigs free.


If you have an Office 365 subscription you get 1TB of OneDrive space included. For an individual, it's $69.99/year. For a household it's $99.99/year and you can put it on up to five devices. Each "person" you share it with also gets 1TB (yes, you could create five different accounts that have 1TB each). And if you're a student, faculty, or staff of a college/university you can get all of that for free, as long as the college/university has a valid agreement with Microsoft.
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Philldoe
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Re: Free file hosts with decent storage capacity?

Sat Apr 22, 2017 3:15 pm

No mention of mega.co.nz

Good stuff.
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jihadjoe
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Re: Free file hosts with decent storage capacity?

Sat Apr 22, 2017 3:43 pm

If you have Amazon Prime then you also have Prime Photos (part of Cloud Drive), which is unlimited storage for pictures or 5GB for other file types.

Or pay $60/year for unlimited storage, with a free trial period for the first 3 months.
 
KeillRandor
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Re: Free file hosts with decent storage capacity?

Sat Apr 22, 2017 4:09 pm

filemail.com goes up to 30GB/7 days per file for free... (It's what I use to send big files to people)
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meerkt
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Re: Free file hosts with decent storage capacity?

Sun Apr 23, 2017 10:24 am

Flying Fox wrote:
You don't need the special client anymore. Just straight up browser (at least on Chrome) would do.

Yeah, that's how it was when I last looked at it a year or two ago. But, nah, too non-standard for sending stuff to "normal" people. And I find it inherently annoying as well.

Filemail: 30GB is nice, but expiring files are a problem, especially with a 7 day TTL and my slowish upstream.
 
Drachasor
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Re: Free file hosts with decent storage capacity?

Fri May 12, 2017 5:00 am

I also recommend considering https://viivo.com/, though there are similar applications. You can use it to encrypt some or all of your cloud storage -- though for free it only can have 5 "lockers" (a locker can be an entire cloud storage or a folder and all sub-folders on a particular cloud). It's pretty nice for adding an extra layer of privacy. I like viivo in particular since it is the only free option I found that works on android and windows.
 
cheesyking
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Re: Free file hosts with decent storage capacity?

Fri May 12, 2017 5:27 am

Amazon s3 is pretty simple to use. Not completely free but for a few GBs it's pretty close to free.
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Drachasor
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Re: Free file hosts with decent storage capacity?

Sun May 14, 2017 1:41 am

cheesyking wrote:
Amazon s3 is pretty simple to use. Not completely free but for a few GBs it's pretty close to free.


Though if you just want a few gigs there are a lot of completely free services.

If you are computer savvy, then I'd also consider setting up a home system as an option (and maybe have it backup to the cloud). It's not that expensive to get a Raspberry Pi or two -- or something similar with gigabit ethernet connections if you have a gigabit internet connection. You can have backups done at home and with a VPN or similar connect to it from wherever. Though for ease of use you might want to buy a domain (which can cost maybe $10-15 a year if you get the cheapest option). Of course, if you have a home NAS already, then this is definitely what you should do (the domain expense is far, far cheaper for the amount of space you'd be getting then).
 
TravelMug
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Re: Free file hosts with decent storage capacity?

Sun May 14, 2017 2:31 am

I don't think you will be able to avoid some self hosting or some form of payment with the requirements you have. A Nextcloud install on the cheapest $5 per month Digital Ocean or a Linode instance will do the trick for example.
 
meerkt
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Re: Free file hosts with decent storage capacity?

Sun May 14, 2017 6:53 am

These are all viable options in certain cases, but not the sort of thing I was after here.
 
cheesyking
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Re: Free file hosts with decent storage capacity?

Mon May 15, 2017 8:12 pm

So what do you actually want?
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MOSFET
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Re: Free file hosts with decent storage capacity?

Mon May 15, 2017 10:58 pm

In my experience, it seems upload speed is absolutely a function of your outbound bandwidth limit. In fact, it IS your outbound bandwidth limit. Dropbox (Pro anyway) has a setting in the Windows client to automatically detect upload speed, to limit upload, or not to limit upload. It seems that the former uses about 80-90% of available upload (in my case), while the latter pegs it (which can make the internet less usable, to a surprising degree.)
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KingLear
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Re: Free file hosts with decent storage capacity?

Mon May 15, 2017 11:17 pm

If you have a decent router, like my Asus, you can plug in a USB hard drive and create your own cloud storage. I use a low power mini-itx running Linux to act as a web server, sftp file server and always on file sharing computer. It's nice to be able to access my stuff from anywhere, even on my phone.

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