As disk space gets bigger and bigger, as bandwidth speeds get faster and faster, the issue of moving your data to your friends and co-workers will move into a new medium. For example, when you take a bunch of pictures with your digital camera, most of the time you send a few of them to people via email.
For those that take more that your usual number of photos (like professional photographers), they like to use a more robust method; adhd Milwaukee like FTP (File Transfer Protocol). Xdrive is a good example (www.xdrive.com). What people do with Xdrive, is they Upload their files and folders to a server, and then the person that wants to receive the files and folders, simply logs in and retrieves them. This is how FTP works; upload to a FTP server and then download to the end user. This method is fairly old (in relation to the lifespan of the internet), but has withstood the test of time.
Users are limited by the ‘lessor’ of the service, who pays for disk space and bandwidth (just like rent). FTP is generally a good method of moving very large files, but depends on the service providers and the internet speeds of both the upload and the download (not to mention the 2-step transfer mechanism).
There is a slew of free file transfer applications that let you move large files, like Pando (www.Pando.com) or BeamFile (www.BeamFile.com), email big files free that allow you to send up to 5000 MB of data to other users of the same software. And since they are both free, then its not a problem to have your contacts download and install the software on their end. These two services are not much different from FTP, and require users to use their respective networks to transfer the data through.
Tirminal is a single client file transfer application, that sends your files and folders from you to anyone, point to point. There is no 3rd party needed, its very secure and is also free. Although you can’t use it on a mac, you can still receive data on one. Tirminal works by emailing a link (or through an IM), where as the person who gets the link is forwarded to a browser window. The files and folders that you want to send, appear in the person’s browser. They can choose individual files to download, or to take the entire folder. Because this transfer is point to point, it is also the fastest method of file transfer you can get. And because of the method of transfer, is also the most secure of all of them.
In the near future, all residential buildings will be built pre-wired for Fiber Optics. With Fiber, you can transfer data at the speed of light, sending a 1 GB file, as fast as you would send an Email. As computer users, we will not stop the increase in our file sizes, but having this new method of data transfer will make our lives much happier. Our hard drives have increased exponentially in the last 10 years. Imagine what they’ll be like in another 10 years. In 1996, my hard drive was 400 MB. In 2006 I have 3 hard drives at work and another 3 at home; on three separate computers- totalling over 600 GB of data. That’s a lot of stuff! I can only assume that that will also go up in the next 10 years, along with everyone else on the plant.
