When you want to send big files over the internet or share large files with others, you need a file transfer or sharing service. You can’t email very big files through email. Normally your email service provider would limit the maximum attachment file size to 10 or 20 MB. If your file is larger, you may need to compress it or split it into smaller parts before sending.
If you like to send larger files, such as those HD videos that can reach over 100MB or even 1GB, you need to consider other alternatives.
There are many free online chat service can help you for that, such as Skype, WhatsApp, WeChat and so on. These free tools are designed for other purpose, but they can also be used as peer-to-peer transfer tool, and best of all, they do not limit the file size you can transfer, and they are totally free. You can use them to send documents (Word, Excel, PPT, PDF….), photos, videos and other large files of any format. However these tools may compress your videos before sending and thus the video quality suffers.
Cloud storage services are very popular nowadays. There are many free file hosting and sharing service, such as Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, etc. These online file hosting service allows you to upload huge files from computer to their cloud server, you can then share the download links with the recipient. It is the most convenient way users can upload large files from one location, then download it from another location. And best of all, the recipients can download the uploaded files anytime they are online. With these services, you can easily send files bigger than 1000MB. If you use Dropbox to transfer big files through their desktop client, you will find there is no size limit at all.
If you have access to an FTP server, you can use an FTP client to upload and share large files. Then provide the people you like to share with the server address and username/password if applicable so they can connect to the FTP server to fetch those files you shared. There are free FTP clients available, such as FileZilla.
If you do not want to sign up any file hosting or sharing service, you can use free web transfer service such as WeTransfer, Sendspace and SendAnywhere.
- WeTransfer lets you send files up to 2 GB in size from the browser.
- SendSpace asks for the recipient’s email only (used to receive the download links of your files), it allows you to send max file size 300MB for free. You do not need to register or sign up an account.
- SendAnywhere is another service that lets you send large files directly or via email. It doesn’t require registration and supports larger file sizes than some other options.
These file transfer services also offer free tools for mobile devices, such as file transfer app for iPhone iPad, Android smartphones, so you can easily send big files from mobile phone to computer, or from a computer to mobile phones.