đź’¸ Sending a file in 2017 #
Evaluating different means to send a file.
My good friend Jessie and I want to watch a documentary movie on turkeys together.1 I have the file on my computer and she does not, so I want to send this file to her directly2 from my computer. There are a couple of restrictions though: the turkey documentary is a ~1 GB file, Jessie lives 2,000 miles away in a different country, Jessie uses Windows OS, and finally Jessie is not a programmer and avoids anything that involves running something on the command-line.
How should I send the movie, in the fastest possible way, so we can start learning about turkeys together?3
Even though it’s 2017, the method I use to send a file from my computer to someone else’s computer will depend greatly on who that someone is and how comfortable they are with computers. Here’s a table I made of the methods I tried with a brief description of what I would do to send the file (with my reaction) and what Jessie does to receive the file (and her reaction).
| Method | What I do | What Jessie does |
|---|---|---|
 mail a USB drive |  plug in USB drive | |
scp | run scp |  determine local IP, log-in to router and forward port 22, start SSH server, generate guest account and send password |
| personal server |  setup port-forwarding, download a server and a reverse proxy |  click a link |
| IPFS |  install IPFS, pin file, warm up cache | click a link |
| WebTorrent |  drag-and-drop file | click a link (hopefully) |
wormhole |  apt-get Python2 ecosystem |  install Python ecosystem and Visual C++ |
croc | run croc |  download croc and double-click |
The documentary is My Life as a Turkey. ↩︎
By “directly” I mean generally without being stored on a server in the process of transferring. ↩︎
For posterity’s sake, here is the relevant XKCD. ↩︎