Movie Making Manual/Transferring large files over the Internet

If you have multiple people downloading a file
The easiest way to transfer a large file (and my interpretation of large is >50GB) would be to use BitTorrent and use your computer as a seed for the file, put a link to the seed on a free webspace provider (GeoCities, MySpace, etc.) and then communicate to the recipient where to find the link. A high speed connection would be a definite requirement, attempting this with a dial-up connection would take approximately 121 days. On a good cable connection, it would take around twenty-four hours.

Another possibility is the use of a P2P network, such as KaZaA, iMesh, or Morpheus. You could host the file, and give it a cryptic name, such as a series of numbers. Give the numbers to the recipient and have them search for it. Once their program finds your file, it will allow the recipient to download it.

Sending a large file to just a few people
The above methods will not help for transferring one file to only one or two people. In that case you have to just put it up on a (hidden) web url and just send the recipient the link to the file. Be sure that this url is not linked from other web pages or you may have search engines and webcrawlers downloading your file.

Generally, e-mail servers will not accept files larger than ten megabytes.

'''But if you have very huge files like 1GB, 10GB, 1000GB files, you can use 123Go v3.0 which is found on dorotheus.com, to transfer single file upto 16000GB. That's incredible. This program is in fact a next-generation file transfer program. You can even resume the large file transfer at your own time.'''

Your own FTP server

 * Wikipedia article on FTP

You could also run a free FTP server on your computer and ask your collaborators to connect to your FTP server. There are free servers for both Windows and Linux. If you're running Linux then give pureFTPd a go - it's very simple to setup. Don't forget to unblock port 21 on your firewall and/or router. If your're running Windows, FileZilla produces an ftp server.

Your own SSH server
SSH is a secure and fast way to send files (and commands to a Linux shell).


 * WikiPedia article on SSH

It's pretty easy to setup an SSH server on a Linux system. Almost all Linux systems have SSHd installed. First you have to log in as root, then add a new user with "useradd -m jack" then give the user a password "passwd jack". If you're using a router or a firewall then you'll have to open port 22.

It is worth noting that the encryption offered by SSH could be considered an unnecessary CPU overhead. However, there are compression features offered by SSH, so your choice to use FTP or SSH should be made based on the speed of the hardware on both ends of the line.

/Tools and equipment