Mozilla's Send and Nofile.io get our thumbs up. These are the file sharing equivalent of a Ford Cortina: not glamorous, but reliably get the job done. And since there's no uploading and downloading to an external server, with files streamed from within your browser, P2P is one of the quickest ways to share. Now, legal services such as Reep.io, JustBeamIt and Fastest.fish can instantly create a network path between your computer and the recipient's. It was Napster, the copyright-infringing file sharing service, that popularised peer-to-peer (P2P) transfers. So, you'll probably pay a subscription fee for extra space if you're sharing very large files, especially on a regular basis. On the downside, free accounts have limited storage. Better still is the option to share entire folders, without the hassle of manually selecting each individual file. Unlike other methods, cloud files exist until you delete them, or stop sharing – so your friends can pick it up at their convenience without you needing to reshare. Usefully, you have access to your files on any computer you're signed in on, as well as on smartphone apps. Share and save multiple files in one locationĮasy to use and omnipresent, all the big guns – Microsoft, Google, Amazon – offer cloud storage, as do cloud-specific companies like go-to file-sharing site, Dropbox (which Steve Jobs once vowed to kill, before Apple's iCloud copied the service wholesale).įree storage is available – anyone with an Outlook or Gmail account automatically gains 5GB and 15GB at OneDrive and Google Drive respectively. Here are some of the best, organised by the type of service they offer. The good news is that there are plenty of online services that offer elegant alternatives for sending bulk files. Email providers hate the extra demand large files place on server workloads, and often prohibit the transfer of anything over 10MB. Unfortunately, email is truly awful for sending anything larger than a word document. That's especially true for those recipients that are outside our organisations when company policies prevent us from sending files directly through in-house platforms such as Slack.

For better or worse, email is still very much a core part of our day-to-day workload, and many of us still rely on it for sending files.

Free file sharing no registration