What is the best site for sharing large files among a specific group of people?

Question

What is the best site that would allow for sharing of large files among a selected group of people? There wouldn't be a large number of files, but they are too large to email.

Edit: I'd like a free site that would allow for sharing of files that are between 500 MB and 1 GB.

Answer 1

I am a big fan of Dropbox, they also have good clients for various OS platforms.

• 2 GB of online storage for free;

• Then, if you invite friends, they will give you both 500 MB of bonus space (up to a limit of 18 GB).

Answer 2

The only free service I was able to find that allowed up to 1 GB files was Pando.

From their info page:

With a free account, you can send files that are up to 1 GB each. (That’s bigger than many people’s whole email account capacity!) You can store up to 5 GB on Pando’s servers at any given time.

Answer 3

Do you have an allocation for a web site through your ISP and how much space does it offer?

You could simply upload the files to a subdirectory of that with an html file that lists the files (don't call it index.html) and then just mail your friends the link.

The can then right click and download the files directly.

Obviously this only works if the total size of the files is less than the space you have allocated by your ISP.

Answer 4

Yousendit.com is a great site for sending large files for free. It also has a premium offering with more features. Much better than email attachments, but lacks features of something like Dropbox or drop.io

Answer 5

I know you've said free, but Amazon S3 would be very cheap for the level of use you're looking at. Storing a 1 GB file on their reduced redundancy service for a week (would that be enough time for everyone to get it?) would be about $0.025 and the bandwidth cost would be $0.15 per GB (you first GB is free).

If your total monthly bill is under about $0.50 it seems to get written off (I've occasionally had bills around the $0.20 - $0.40 range cancelled), presumably because the credit card fees on those amounts would result in a loss for them.

Answer 6

What happened to the good old Torrents?

The network isn't illegal or anything, it doesn't cost anything and if you want to share that 2 GB of SLR pictures with 108 other people, it's about the easiest thing to set up. Well, that only means that someone has to explain the setup of a Torrent client to all of them, whereas the geek in the crowd can create the torrent.

It worked for me, the 1.5 GB of pictures and the 100+ other people.

Dropbox on the other hand is totally great, I use it myself, buuut... it has some downsides: The 2 GB limit, the traffic limit (100klicks on that 1.5 GB zip? - bam, public links temporarily disabled), and if you want to create a shared folder, you have to pass e-mail invites to all the others, who have to accept the mail, sign up and install the software. For ~5 people it's easy. For 20+ it can become a pain in the neck.

EDIT: As it turns out, there's a web-based torrent client called BitLet, so basically there now only needs to be one geek in a group to set up a torrent, the other guys can use the webapp. Nice.

Answer 7

Another favorite option is File Apartment. Easy to use, fast, no software to download or registration, up to 1 GB, free option, safe, and secure.