Large File Transfer Recommendations

Hey,

I have time sensitive project with some shooting overseas. I am recommending an overnight-ish courier of a hard drive, but there is pressure to explore an internet option.

We're talking about five or so 10-20 minute greenscreen interviews, ProRes422 1080p 29.97... so in the neighbourhood of 100GB total.

Anybody have any recommendations for a file transfer service that works well for this? I'm thinking that there will be some clips that are ~10 minutes between start/stop, so the service needs to be able to reliably resume a dropped transfer due to a network or computer issue.

Anyone have any recommendations? Would a DropBox or Google Drive or similar work well? Or maybe a bespoke FTP service like BrickFTP?

Not quite the capacity at free but
Mega free accounts have 50GB capacity with no file size limit
mega.co.nz

With that amount of footage, overnight a drive. It's much more reliable. Dropbox/Google Drive will suspend your account because you'll hit their bandwidth limit. Webhosts often have FTP terms that prevent you from using their service as a file dump. I think personally you'll spend way too much time figuring it out and sending a drive will be much simpler, easier, and reliable.

Several issues:

(1) The sender would need high speed upload. Most broadband packages are asymmetrical -- upload is much slower than download.

(2) The ISP of both sender and receiver should not have data caps. In many areas of the U.S, monthly data caps exist, e.g, Comcast is 300GB per month. Comcast business accounts don't have data caps, but upload speed is about 1/6th of the download speed.

With their 105 megabit service, upload is about 20 megabit/sec so would take approx. 12 hr for a 100 GB file.

(3) Transfer restart/resume: The transfer process would need restart/resume capability, otherwise a glitch at 10 hr into the transfer would require starting over.

(4) End-to-end integrity check: Either the transfer process or you when packaging the files need to scan the file and include a CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check) field. This ensures the recipient gets the file uncorrupted. ZIP automatically does this but I never tried to ZIP a 100GB file.

(5) If all of the above is done, the file transfer service itself (separate from the ISP) must have no data cap or file size limits which would restrict you.

File transfer services fall into two categories:

(1) Store-and-forward: e.g, WeTransfer, TransferBigFiles.com, Google Drive, etc.
(2) Peer-to-peer: e.g: direct P2P FTP, www.filesovermiles.com , www.infinit.io

Private P2P transfer avoids separate upload and download phases -- the file is sent directly to recipient. However both source and destination computers must be simultaneously on line and ready. It is essentially the longer-distance version of copying a file across a LAN.

Yet another way is just use OS X file sharing but set up a VPN so the file can be copied from source to destination. In this case I'd split the 100GB file before sending it and join the segments on the receiving end. Ideally the software doing this should embed a CRC (checksum) to verify end-to-end integrity.

If you get these set up, have access to symmetrical broadband without data cap, at 120 megabit/sec it would take about 2 hr to send a 100GB file peer-to-peer.

I agree in most cases it's easier just to overnight a portable hard drive.