A one-gigabyte video, a four-gigabyte design file, a folder full of scans: sooner or later you hit the limits of your mailbox. These are the seven common ways to send large files, with what each is good at and where it lets you down.
1. Plain e-mail attachment
Most providers cap attachments around 20 to 25 MB, and the receiving mailbox is often stricter than the sending one. Fine for documents, useless for anything called "large". Added business drawback: an attachment can never be recalled and leaves copies everywhere.
2. WeTransfer and similar free services
The best-known route: upload, enter an address, done. Free up to a few gigabytes, which is excellent for private use. For business you miss the basics: no password in the free tier, no revocable links, no download insight. We compared the differences point by point.
3. Cloud drives: Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox
You share a link from your own cloud storage rather than sending a file. Works well inside an organisation that lives in that cloud anyway. Mind the pitfalls: default settings sometimes share wider than intended ("anyone with the link"), and American hosting complicates GDPR accountability for personal data.
4. Physical: USB stick or external drive
Sounds dated, but for terabytes of video material to a regular partner, a drive by courier is sometimes genuinely the fastest route. The drawbacks are equally physical: losing it is a data breach, and without encryption on the drive itself that is immediately a reportable one.
5. Your own server: FTP or SFTP
The classic approach for structural exchange between companies. Reliable and without size limits, but it demands administration, accounts per party and technical knowledge on both ends. For occasionally sending something to a client it is overkill, and a missed update or weak password turns your server into a liability.
6. Peer-to-peer, browser to browser
Services that send the file directly from your computer to the recipient, without intermediate storage. Elegant and unlimited, but both parties must be online simultaneously for the entire transfer. For tens of gigabytes on an ordinary connection, that is an afternoon of babysitting.
7. The secured sharing link
The file sits encrypted in one place, and you share a link per recipient with a password and an expiry date. The size limit depends on your plan (up to 5 GB per file at codocs), and the link can be revoked at any moment. The difference with methods 2 and 3 is not the uploading but what happens afterwards: ending access, seeing who downloaded, and being able to account for it when someone asks.
Which one fits you?
For private use: method 2, done. For a one-off enormous delivery to a regular partner: 4 or 5. For anything containing client data, contracts or personal data, the question is not "how do I get it there" but "who can reach it, and until when". That leads to a secured sharing link, and to getting the rest right too: EU hosting, encryption at rest and an audit log. What that looks like is in sending business files: how to do it securely.