<story><title>Ask HN: What is your favorite method of sending large files?</title><text>I just opened up a simple HTTP server to send someone a large file. Then I figured, I never gave this question proper thought.&lt;p&gt;But some of you have, and I figured they make for fun and interesting stories ;-)&lt;p&gt;So what&amp;#x27;s your favorite method to send large files, of at least 5GB or bigger? Though, I&amp;#x27;m also curious on how you&amp;#x27;d send 10TB or more.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>livueta</author><text>Bittorrent. No, really. Lots of nice behaviors when transferring large amounts of data between arbitrary endpoints.&lt;p&gt;Transferring the torrent metadata is pretty trivial and can be done via a wide range of methods, and having that flexibility can be nice.&lt;p&gt;Unlike HTTP, you get reasonable retry behavior on network hiccups. 
Also, more robust data integrity guarantees, though a manual hash test is probably a good idea either way.&lt;p&gt;At least among people I&amp;#x27;m throwing TBs of data around with, torrent infra is common and it&amp;#x27;s nice to not have to deal with some special-purpose tool that, in practice, is probably a pain in the ass to get compatible versions deployed across a range of OSes. Basically every platform known to man can run a torrent client of some sort.&lt;p&gt;And obviously, no dependency on an intermediary. This is good if you&amp;#x27;re trying to avoid Google et al. That does, however, bring a potential con: if my side is fast and your side is slow, I&amp;#x27;m seeing until you&amp;#x27;re done. If I&amp;#x27;m uploading something to gdrive or whatever, I can disconnect one r the upload is done. If you control an intermediary like a seedbox, that&amp;#x27;s less of a problem.&lt;p&gt;In general, though, torrents are pretty great for this sort of thing. Just encrypt your stuff beforehand.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arsome</author><text>Just be careful - unless you mark that torrent private it&amp;#x27;ll get posted to the DHT and crawlers like BtDig will pick it up and list it publicly.&lt;p&gt;For this reason I prefer using something like Syncthing which is designed more with this purpose in mind.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: What is your favorite method of sending large files?</title><text>I just opened up a simple HTTP server to send someone a large file. Then I figured, I never gave this question proper thought.&lt;p&gt;But some of you have, and I figured they make for fun and interesting stories ;-)&lt;p&gt;So what&amp;#x27;s your favorite method to send large files, of at least 5GB or bigger? Though, I&amp;#x27;m also curious on how you&amp;#x27;d send 10TB or more.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>livueta</author><text>Bittorrent. No, really. Lots of nice behaviors when transferring large amounts of data between arbitrary endpoints.&lt;p&gt;Transferring the torrent metadata is pretty trivial and can be done via a wide range of methods, and having that flexibility can be nice.&lt;p&gt;Unlike HTTP, you get reasonable retry behavior on network hiccups. 
Also, more robust data integrity guarantees, though a manual hash test is probably a good idea either way.&lt;p&gt;At least among people I&amp;#x27;m throwing TBs of data around with, torrent infra is common and it&amp;#x27;s nice to not have to deal with some special-purpose tool that, in practice, is probably a pain in the ass to get compatible versions deployed across a range of OSes. Basically every platform known to man can run a torrent client of some sort.&lt;p&gt;And obviously, no dependency on an intermediary. This is good if you&amp;#x27;re trying to avoid Google et al. That does, however, bring a potential con: if my side is fast and your side is slow, I&amp;#x27;m seeing until you&amp;#x27;re done. If I&amp;#x27;m uploading something to gdrive or whatever, I can disconnect one r the upload is done. If you control an intermediary like a seedbox, that&amp;#x27;s less of a problem.&lt;p&gt;In general, though, torrents are pretty great for this sort of thing. Just encrypt your stuff beforehand.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>libertine</author><text>Sometimes I wonder if the bad connotation due to piracy made this protocol not standard (in a sense, that&amp;#x27;s not widely adopted, and people need dedicated clients, instead of it working for example in browsers).&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know enough, maybe it has security issues, or some limits... but the fact is that it&amp;#x27;s still widely used, by tech literate people, so it still stands the test of time and it must be doing something right.</text></comment>