Send large attachments

Questions
1

I regularly need to send sensitive legal files larger then what email typically allows. Email in itself is not private most of the time, of course. And, these files need to go to people who don’t seem to understand many services scan and AI or worse what you send them.

Which free service would you recommend to privately send sensitive legal files to privacy ignorant people?

2

Proton drive file share.

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3

Uploading to an encrypted cloud storage service like Proton Drive and sharing it with a link to the folder with pertinent files is the best way to go about it.

Of course, you only get 1 GB at most I think, for free.

4

It’s 5 Gb.

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5

There are a few things to consider here:

  • how large are we talking, 10 GB or 500 GB? emails do have a very low limit
  • how sensitive is it? consider encrypting the archive with a password before uploading it anywhere
  • are you tech savvy? if yes, you can self-host Send, or something similar with this or this
    • can be fully customized with the ability to set a password, view times, date expiration, keep it in a bucket for X amount of days etc :+1:t2:
  • if you’re not tech-savvy, you could use some of the public instances, some of those go up to 10GB
  • consider also using tools to split files in several chunks with something like 7zip if you want to get under a specific size limit upload
    • end users will need to not be confused by having parts of the final archive file
  • you can also use some simple p2p approach if you want the simplest/fastest way from 1 computer (yours) to the other person and if it’s not whistleblower critical :+1:t2: (lowest friction of all yet better than WeTransfer any day)
    • the web developer that created this project is also trustworthy, hence why I’m recommending this to begin with (even if it is not an open hosted project)

Yes: Proton Drive cloud storage pricing and plans | Proton

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How do you send large files privately?
6

I misremembered. Or maybe they changed it. I’ve been on the paid plan for so long, I had forgotten.

7

You could use OnionShare.

It wont be the fastest option but it should meet your requirments for secure and private.

8

Excellent list, lays out what I would have too. Minor correction, mostly for the benefit of the reader, here: Wormhole./app is not related to magic-wormhole (which is a widely studied and secure PAKE based sharing protocol).

I was a bit confused when I first saw the link, so I just thought I’d share the open source alternative. tptacek (someone popular in cryptography circles and founder of fly./io) seems to agree that the name is confusing (Wormhole.app and magic-wormhole have different goals. Wormhole.app works in the ... | Hacker News).

Incidentally, I strongly recommend magic wormhole for large file sharing, since it requires just downloading an app and sharing a few words to type in/QR code to scan.

If you are averse to downloading an app, a web version which is open source and can generate a shareable link is: Winden - secure, fast and easy file transfer (0.5.4-beta)

Magic-wormhole requires both users to be online, but has no limits on file size.

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