Kerkia

Background

Unless you want to share photos or videos using a specialized service or web site such as YouTube, Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, etc., then the natural way of sharing files is to email or IM them to your friend, colleague, customer, etc. However, this does not work well with large files, as email servers often cap the maximum size of files that can be emailed, while IM tools become unreliable with too large files in case they don’t also just cap their maximum size.

To overcome this difficulty, many solutions have recently been proposed. A first solution is to use a file sharing web service such as those we reviewed in our online backup article (Google Docs, Microsoft SkyDrive, etc.), which typically do support sharing file. This makes for a rather cumbersome workflow when you just want to email a file however. Other more specialized solutions have then be created for that very need.

Recommendations

GE.TT is the best solution we found. It does not seem to have any file size or number restriction, and the only limit we found is about the number of days the file remains available once uploaded, 30 days without an account and 2 to 3 months if you do create an account. The solution is not very fast but it has a very neat features which is to allow downloading while you are uploading, thus compensating nicely for speed. You use it without any download, by simply uploading a file and then receiving an url that you share to those who need to download.

Pando is the solution we used to recommend. Their free version does work pretty well, and it includes a very handy desktop client in order to manage the downloads and uploads. It also integrates very well with Outlook, making it transparent for the user. There are limitations of course, e.g. transfer speed, file size (limited to 1GB), ads, hosting time (the files don’t remain available to the recipient forever) and security, which the paid version offers solutions for, but we have not found other, better, free solutions out there, and those limitations are fine for most personal usage.

Web links

GE.TT

Web site: http://ge.tt/

Pando

Web site: http://www.pando.com/

Download: http://www.pando.com/download