I Gotta Send Someone A Large File, What Do I Do?

So you have a large file, maybe it’s a video or some audio or even a huge .PDF file and you can’t send it to your client because of email attachment size limitations. What do you do? Do you put it on a flash drive and FedEx it? NO! You use technology and get the job done in seconds. First things first, I gotta explain to you about email file size limitations and why we use them. File size limitations come from back in the day when traditional technologies reigned. Storage space was an issue, so to police this issue, I.T. Admins started limiting the amount of data you could send and can receive. The idea behind this was that if someone sent a few emails each with a 100MB attachment, it could crash the server due to storage space limitations. Obviously everyone’s mailbox has limitations and you have to do some policing now and then, but sometimes there are situations where sending a large attachment is not feasible via email. Let’s take Google Apps or any hosted email service for example. The average limit for an email WITH attachment is 20MB. Some places are 25, others are 30 but let’s stick with the 20MB example. This number is the amount of data that can be sent and received through one single email. This number encompasses the message PLUS the attachment. If you have a 20MB attachment that you’re trying to send, it will be rejected by the recipient server because the message PLUS the 20MB attachment is over 20MB. People don’t realize this, and they get annoyed thinking they are meeting the threshold when in reality they are a little above the threshold. So sending large attachments through email is out. One option I like is using Google Drive. If you have a Google account, you can use Google Drive to send a large file. Everyone gets 5GB of free storage. You can easily upload your files to Google Drive, share out the files with your client and send them a link to download the file, no sweat. For those who don’t have a Google Account, you can use Dropbox. If you don’t know what Dropbox is by now, Google it, it’s awesome. Within Dropbox you get 2GB of free storage. To share out a file, upload your file to a Dropbox folder and then within the settings of your account, share that folder out with your client using their email. The client will get an email with a link to access the file, again, a very easy solution. The last two options would work if you had a Google or Dropbox account, but what you don’t have these accounts? Here’s your third solution, setup a free account with box.com. They’ll give you a free 5GB online storage box for you to then store items and share them out much like the other two options. With this solution, you can share items out via email address for easy access. Email links will send your recipients to box.com, where they can easily download your material. The last solution that we’ll talk about is transferbigfiles.com. It’s a pretty cool service, right from the website you can drag files to a location and email them to your recipient. Keep in mind that you’re not emailing the recipient your files, you just emailing them a link to where the files will be located on the transferbigfiles.com website. If these are client documents I would really only trust Google or box.com for the transfer. They offer the highest security for their users.