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HOME TOPICS ABOUT ME We use someone else's disk space for temporary file storage. |
technofile Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983 FreeDrive Web site: Share huge files with easeAugust 2, 2000 By Al Fasoldt Copyright ©2000, Al Fasoldt Copyright ©2000, The Syracuse Newspapers My brother Bob is an expert at recording video on computers. He's been transferring old family movies -- some from the 1940s -- into digital form so they can be stored and viewed on computers. But he can't share them with me by e-mail. The files would be too big to send, even after he's compressed them using video MPEG techniques. Even the short sample files he creates can be 30 or 40 megabytes. And that's about 10 times as big as any file he can send as an attachment in the mail. His Internet Service Provider won't let him send attachments larger than a couple of megabytes. Mine's the same way, and yours probably is, too. So my brother and I use a different method to share such huge files. He uploads them to a Web site, then e-mails me a note telling me what the files are called. Then I log onto the same Web site and download them. In other words, we use someone else's disk space for temporary file storage. In our case, "someone else" is a company named FreeDrive Inc. Its Web site is http://www.freedrive.com. As the name indicates, you don't have to pay to use the storage space offered by FreeDrive. Advertising on the site pays your way. FreeDrive does have some pay-as-you-go functions, but its basic file-sharing folders don't cost anything. You sign up for FreeDrive just by going to the Web site and giving your e-mail address and a password. A cookie provides your name to FreeDrive each time you want to log on, but you have to type the password yourself unless your browser fills passwords out for you. (This auto-fill feature for passwords is a bad idea, so consider turning that feature off if your browser does this for you.) FreeDrive has another big advantage for us, too: My brother uses Windows and I use Linux. That doesn't matter to FreeDrive, because all file activities -- uploading, downloading and deletions -- are done using HTML code and JavaScript. (Nearly all Windows, Linux and Mac browsers handle HTML and JavaScript well.) No doubt there are other sites that offer the same kind of file storage. I didn't try any others, figuring a free site that works as advertised is pretty hard to beat. But don't shy away from trying any other file-sharing sites that you find. (If your PC uses Windows, be sure to download and install the free OptOut program from Steve Gibson at http://www.grc.com to guard against spyware from ad-supported sites. As far as I could tell, FreeDrive doesn't plant spyware, but don't assume that other sites have the same decency. I don't know of any spyware that can be planted on Macs or Linux computers.) FreeDrive limits your storage space to 50 megabytes. That sounds like a lot, but it's not much when you share video files. My brother and I both wish that limitation weren't there, but we get around it by sharing truly gigantic files by other means. We can send them on CD-ROM disks, for example. We like FreeDrive for another reason as well. In the good old days before the Internet became the playground for half-wits who get their kicks breaking into computers, the two of us shared files using our own ftp servers. The venerable download method called "file transfer protocol," written as "ftp" in small letters, is used by Internet file servers all over the world, but individuals can use it, too. But Internet service providers try to discourage their users from running ftp server programs from their home connections because such home-based servers are seldom secure against breakins. Home ftp servers also drag down the performance of the main server at an ISP. A site such as FreeDrive gets around the problem. You don't need to run an ftp server to share large files, and you can do your own file uploading and downloading without worrying about security. |