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An Alternative to FTP February 18th, 2010

David Mead

David Mead

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Recently, I used YouSendIt to transfer 400+MB of database backups from one of our client’s hosted servers to our in-house quality assurance servers at NavigationArts. I found it an easy-to-use alternative to FTP.

Because the originating host was one of our client’s production servers, I could not install the optional YouSendIt client app. The transfer was done via the browser only. Even so, I was pleased with the throughput. I was also pleased with the e-mail I received immediately after the file was ready.

Yes, I had to upload from the client’s server to YouSendIt, then download from YouSendIt to my server in-house (rather than FTP it directly to an internal server, then just copy the file). Still, it was relatively quick and painless. No FTP client or other program to install on the production server. I know, I could have used IE as an FTP client, but since the file was enormous and I wanted it to work the first time, I hoped for a more specific solution.

I often use Dropbox for a similar purpose when transferring code updates to production servers, but I found that it didn’t readily work for the large file transfer I needed. YouSendIt worked great, though.

Some screenshots are below.

Transfer via the browser:

Success page with a URL (not shown here, but it’s an https URL):

Notification letting me know a link to the file was sent to my recipient (in this case, I was the recipient):

Since I was the recipient, here’s the email I received (I removed the link and the timestamp of the e-mail):

Note: I am using a paid YouSendIt plan, so YMMV. The free version limits you to 100MB max file size. They also have 1-time pay-per-use pricing.

I hope this helps someone looking for an easy alternative to FTP (or overnight-delivered-DVD) for quick large-file transfers.

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