Send Large Files Safely Without Being Intercepted By Other People

Instructions to move massive records without transferring them to distributed storage administrations, for example, Google Drive or Onedrive: the information is communicated straightforwardly from your PC through a safe association. When you move enormous documents starting with one gadget and then onto the next, you are continually confronted with the standard issue: which program, web application, or administration to utilize.

Any essential email administration will permit you to send messages up to 25-50MB. An email has become progressively less supportive for sending enormous documents, particularly assuming that the objective is to securely move records without any other person having the option to take the substance.

In the article How to email enormous documents, we have proactively introduced an entire series of answers for sharing massive records through email or utilizing different devices.

Distributing documents on Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, or other distributed storage administrations is, without a doubt, a phenomenal arrangement: the material in this way stays accessible on the web.

The beneficiary can download it at the most incredible speed conceivable (that is permitted by his relying upon the transmission capacity accessible downstream), and the download of shared records can be designed so that it must be performed by the people who own the immediate URL or by the proprietors of a particular client account.

The free assistance of the different distributed storage devices is, as of now, supportive. It permits you to share records without enacting any paid variant or introducing extra programming locally. The main hindrances to utilizing Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, and comparative administrations to share records on the web and send weighty documents to different clients are that transferring the material will be vital.

It will be put away, for a brief time, on servers that are not under your immediate control. All the most renowned distributed storage specialist co-ops express that the information is encoded on the chance to safeguard its items. In any case, more mindful clients could involve an extra safety effort that comprises compacting every one of the information that will be shared utilizing a program, for example, 7zip, taking into consideration the use of the .

7z organization and enacting encryption with the AES-256 encryption calculation (the system to follow is the one shown toward the finish of the article Sending weighty documents without introducing anything on the PC ). You can utilize notable administrations like WeTransfer, JumboMail, FileMail, pCloud Move, and Crush as a choice for distributed storage instruments.

How To Send Large Files Safely Without Relying On Any Online Service

There are situations where the goal is to share large files with a remote user (or with multiple people) without publishing the material on servers managed by third parties (for example, Google, Microsoft, Dropbox, and so on). A tool that allows you to send large files safely, ensuring that any unauthorized user cannot read the material, is called OnionShare.

Based on the Tor network ( The Onion Router; see Tor Browser, what it is and how the new version of the program works ), OnionShare creates a server on the local system and allows files to be downloaded only to remote users with the correct link. OnionShare does not restrict the size of files that can be shared with remote users. Furthermore, sharing securely takes place, not allowing third parties to carry out man-in-the-middle attacks or allowing the identity of the users involved in the communication to be traced.

In the case of OnionShare, remote users download the file directly from the PC of the person who shared it: the program accepts any file which is automatically inserted, together with any others that may be shared, in a single compressed archive in Zip format. OnionShare, upon connection to the Tor network, generates a .onion address to which remote users can connect to download the Zip file containing all the shared material.

How OnionShare Works And How To Send Large Files

Using OnionShare is very simple: download the installation file compatible with the operating system in use ( there are versions for Windows, macOS, and Linux ) from this page and proceed with the setup.

The latest versions of OnionShare no longer require the presence of a Tor Browser on the system in use: the connection to the Tor network is made automatically by default when launching OnionShare; drag and drop the heavy files you want to share into the Grab and Drop Files pane above.

Click on the green Start sharing button to obtain, after a few moments of waiting, the .onion URL to be communicated to the remote user who must download the shared files. It’s worth noting that the .onion URL is randomly generated, and an equally “fancy” directory name is added to it (in the example in the trance-backless image ).

A user who tries to link to the .onion URL without specifying, in this case, also trance-backless, will get a 404 error (“page not found”). The URL indicated by OnionShare must be communicated to the remote user interested in downloading the shared files. To start downloading the files, you must download and install Tor Browser, start it, then paste the URL provided by OnionShare into the Tor Browser address bar.

The user will connect, through the Tor network, to the system of the user who shared the files, and with a click on Download File, he will be able to start the download. It is essential to highlight that the download speed and the downstream bandwidth will be influenced by the upload bandwidth available to the user who shared the files. 

Users with fiber connections (FTTH and FTTC) should have no problems and ensure fast file transfers; on the other hand, those who still use ADSL connections may not offer more modest performance during data download (especially if the available upstream bandwidth is less than 1 Mbps).

Furthermore, by default, OnionShare allows file sharing with a single remote user: once the 

download is complete, the sharing operation is automatically interrupted. To change this behavior, click on the icon at the bottom right representing a small gear and uncheck the Stop sharing after the first download box.

Furthermore, if you tick the Use auto-stop timer box, you can set a very short-term deadline for the files shared with OnionShare. At the end of the indicated time, sharing will automatically be deactivated. To set the sharing duration (validity of the .onion link ), act on the Stop the share indication, which will appear on the OnionShare main screen.

ALSO READ: Digital Insurance: 4 Trends Where Policyholders Are The Focus