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Easiest way to effectively send files to my parents?

K

KnickNut3

Platinum Member
Hey, need to send a couple gig worth of files home. I can't set up an FTP because my university thinks you're running some big warez ring the second someone connects to you using the ftp protocol (had problems before). Can't do AIM send because it always gets stuck. Having them set up an FTP is also a bit too cumbersome--takes me some time to do it with our home lan, so they'd be pretty lost on doing it themselves.

Any suggestions on how I can transfer these files effectively? Thanks for the help.
 
What about email? I know email may croak on extremely large files. Can you break this down into smaller batches of files? You could try the whole thing at once first and see whether it works. If not, try smaller batches.

Edit: Oh, wait, I think I got my megs and my gigs confused. For a couple gigs, yeh, I agree with others that CD's or DVD's are probably the best way to handle this. Plus, you'll have the files backed up that way.
 
I also recommend sending CD's if you actually need to send a couple of GB's.

For a couple hundred megs I would transfer them using netmeeting.
 
you can't cheap out on this one... without FTP, a couple GBs calls for physical discs to be shipped...

You may want to try http://www.yousendit.com/ but I don't trust uploading large files like that thru http... depends how much time you have to waste. Basically it sends them an email with a direct link to your file. Worked pretty well for me on the receiving end of a 300MB file.
 
You could use something like BitTorrent, but, everything depends on your and your parent's connection speeds.
 
Originally posted by: Farmer
You could use something like BitTorrent, but, everything depends on your and your parent's connection speeds.
Click to expand...

Now there is an interesting idea. A fully legitimate use for the technology, even if it doesn't use it to its fullest potential.

On the ftp idea: does your university inspect the packets themselves or does it go by port number? You could potentially run your server on a different port. I would personally go with the ssh/sftp solution but that would probably require you to run either cygwin or *nix.

Also, you might want to take your universities policies into consideration. Maybe it's warez they're concerned about or maybe it's bandwidth. Even large legal file transfers may not be wanted. Then you should be thinking about cds/dvds.
 

Please remember that bittorrent was NOT designed to be a p2p warez network. Its simply a internet protocol designed to distribute sending large amounts of data between large amounts of people.

It's like saying FTP is a p2p network. I've got news for you the entire internet is a p2p network, when you connect your computer it's as much as a part of the internet as www.anandtech.com is.

Actually it was originally intended for distributing Linux cdroms. It can get very expensive for a non-profit to distribute cdrom images thru a ftp server when you have to pay for the amount of bandwidth you have to use.

For instance in the recent release of Fedora Core3 operating system they moved 37 terrabytes worth of information in a few days. That's impossible with normal internet protocols.

Anyways for Bittorrent to work you need to have a large number of people seeding. Otherwise it's not any more effective then ftp websites.



What I do when I need to send a large file is I setup a Apache web server and simply e-mail a link to whoever I want to download it. I ask them to send a e-mail back when they have downloaded it successfully.

They have Apache web servers for Windows if you don't have a Linux/BSD/whatever OS laying around. You also need to have a port exposed to the internet.

Usually if it's a very big file I'll split it up into 10meg sections. With a 4gig file that would be around 400+ files or so (usually something that big would be a entire directory of stuff in a tar file).

With scripting it's realy easy to do once you know how. That way if they can't download it all at once, then can download it in sections. If any part the connection gets interrupted then it's only about a maximum of 10megs that has to be redownloaded.

Plus if you compress a big file and any part gets corrupted you loose that entire file, but if you split the file up and compress each section then if any part gets corrupted then you only loose that section and not the entire file.

I recently used this method to backup my home directory because I am going to reformat and change my computer around drasticly. I ended up with 4558 10meg files.... That way I can easily copy them and burn bunches of them to cdroms or copy them to a few different harddrives (because my home folder was on the biggest drive I own.)

With scripting you just make the computer do all the leg work.

With Windows you can split them up into "rar" files or whatnot using GUI tools, but if it's a big file it'll probably just be easier to just send them a DVD with the information burned on them thru the mail.
 
Originally posted by: Farmer
You could use something like BitTorrent, but, everything depends on your and your parent's connection speeds.
Click to expand...
umm... if schools block FTP, wouldn't they likely put a stop to BT also ? Which schools allow BT ? It's as much a threat as any P2P.
 
CDR via the mail is probably the best option.

I don't think anyone has mentioned IRC yet. You could grab mIRC, hop on an empty channel, and transfer the files over.
 
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