How to Send Files to the Galaxy

Introduction

As a part of the project I work on, we have to develop a web app for sending files in batches larger than 2gb to a given location. As you may know, to send large files via email is still the main way of doing this. We did some research and found that it’s pretty easy to do so but unfortunately, there are no free services for this at all.

So, I decided to write about it here since I think sharing our research could be useful for other developers out there who are trying to do this kind of thing. In this post, I’ll share my experience and some tips that I thought would be helpful for you.

1. How to Send Files to the Galaxy

Image files are generally “too big” to transfer in a safe way over E-mail. They’re bigger than the capacity of most people’s smartphones, and while they may be smaller than a traditional hard disk, they are still larger than the capacity of most people’s internal hard drives.

Luckily, there is software that can compress your files to a size which a smartphone can read. It is called uTorrent and it does so by generating a series of “chunks” of data, each for the file you want to send. After all, you will probably want to share your files with multiple people at once. This means that if you want to send something like an image to someone or want to upload some video clips from YouTube, you needn’t worry about sending 2GB of data — it will be too big for even halfway decent smartphones (but it won’t matter).

2. Why Sending Files to the Galaxy is Important

The internet is perfect for uploading large files, like photos or music. But it’s also perfect for downloading large files, like movies or games.

Uploading large files is easy enough, but actually sending them to the destination you want can be a problem. A typical upload goes something like this: You tell your computer where to store the file (which usually means your computer). Your computer takes a file and stores it somewhere on its hard drive. The next time you want to download the file, your computer will ask you where that file is stored on your hard drive (which means your computer will go through the process of copying and moving the file from hard drive A to hard drive B). That’s great if you have a large internal (or external) hard drive and space for it all. Unfortunately, most people don’t have large internal hard drives and thus can’t rely on their computers for this delivery service.

What about when we need to send a file across hundreds of miles? While uploading data at our home PC is practically impossible, we can try using an external USB flash drive. But sending data across the internet via USB-to-USB tape is not an option — it would take too long and involve too much effort (and expense) to make it work. What then?

Enter Amazon Prime Video — or any other streaming video service that offers free downloads of popular movies and television shows as well as paid subscriptions (aka: TV shows). A lot of people don’t know this but most major video streaming services offer free downloads of popular movies and television shows in HD quality (or less quality depending on how good they are at encoding) through Amazon Prime Video. Why doesn’t everyone use this service? Because they know they should pay for their movie/show/TV show subscriptions but don’t want to pay for them yet because once they do, they realize that many of these titles aren’t worth paying for yet so they delay paying until later when prices drop again. But once you get into paying for these streaming services you realize that there are many movies and videos out there that aren’t worth paying for yet so you wait until prices drop some more before buying those titles; which brings us back to why we need cheap internet access at home in order to send files across hundreds of miles without breaking a sweat.

The solution here isn’t going overdrive just yet though.

Conclusion

As someone who works in the data field and has done for a few years, I’ve been using Dropbox for a while now. It is an excellent service with many benefits. It is fast, reliable, secure and allows you to share your files with a single click. It’s an excellent service that does its job well and I recommend it to everyone who wants to use it.

However, there are some downsides too (I haven’t used Apple’s iCloud but I hear great things about it).

The main downside is that you can’t share files between your devices (iPad, MacBook or iPhone).

Additionally, Dropbox is not free. In fact, they charge you €3 per month for their paid services which means that if you want unlimited storage, you will have to pay €6 every month – which is not very cheap.

The good news though is that they offer free file upload service on many of their customers. They offer 1gb of storage at no charge with 30 gigabytes free after that – so if you are looking for a free file uploading service Dropbox seems like the way to go.