[ryandrake]

I recently had to have a non-technical person send me a very large file, and encountered this. There really is no good universal way to do this, even here in 2024! File is too big for E-mail, ftp is too big a technical hurdle for the guy. Dropbox requires accounts and sharing and all sorts of access shit for him to figure out. I ended up enabling WebDAV on an existing web server I have admin access to, and luckily he's on MacOS which makes it relatively straightforward to write a file to WebDAV. If he were on Windows I have no idea what I'd ask him to do, since I tried for 20 minutes to figure out how to actually connect to a WebDAV folder in read-write mode and Microsoft thwarted me at every turn.

It's pretty shocking that we don't have a dead-simple cross-platform "send a file to someone over the Internet" solution that doesn't involve cloud servers and accounts and downloading apps.

[shiroiushi]

>File is too big for E-mail,

Back in the old days, we would have used PKZIP or RAR to split the file into smaller pieces.

>ftp is too big a technical hurdle for the guy

Back in the old days, even a secretary could figure out how to use the MS-DOS command line well enough to get her job done. I'm not sure what happened between then and now, but these days people just say "I'm non-technical" and refuse to learn anything that doesn't involve a GUI. FTP isn't hard, it's just a few commands, and it's much easier to tell someone how to send FTP than to use any GUI, since you can type out the exact commands to use:

1. ftp [ip address] 2. type username 3. type password 4. cd dir-to-drop-files 5. put filename 6. quit

These days, we'd use sftp anyway, but you could also use scp in a single command line which they could simply copy-and-paste from an email, after you have their temporary account set up.

[dspillett]

> Back in the old days, we would have used PKZIP or RAR to split the file into smaller pieces.

Back then there were far fewer non-technical people using email anyway. In my experience people like office admins wouldn't do anything with split archives they would get the local computer person to do it for them (and the same would happen at the receiving end). They were generally aware of zip files, but might get a local tech to compress things for them even if a split archive wasn't needed.

Or they would just send a floppy in the post if the file would fit on there but the email limit at one end or both was less than 1440K. On one occasion because no one was free to help otherwise I remember a secretary driving a floppy between campusesses to deliver updated slides for a talk because she couldn't get it pushed through email (I forget if the biggest blocker was at the sending or receiving end).

Things changed quite a lot when decent GUI zip tools became common, and again when shell-integrated ones arrived in the Win95 era.

Flipping back through time to now, there are two problems that we didn't have back then:

1. Phones don't have particularly good+friendly archivers, and even if one is found security protections might mean said archiver can't access the data it needs from the app that generated it. As well as talking someone through the archiving process you might need to try work out how to open the relevant permissions and describe that to the remote non-technical user too.

2. Often desktop environments are locked down too, and Windows for instance doesn't come out of the box with an archiver, neither CLI nor GUI, that supports multi-volume archives or encryption worth bothering with.

> Back in the old days, even a secretary could figure out how to use the MS-DOS command line well enough to get her job done.

Some would do that, but I wouldn't say they were the majority by quite a margin in my experience. And not just secretaries: higher paid managers & such too. In fact them more so (as they would drop the task on a secretary, who would then enlist the office kid who knew some tech).

> FTP isn't hard, it's just a few commands, and it's much easier to tell someone how to send FTP than to use any GUI, since you can type out the exact commands to use:

The issue with that was (still is) that they will need telling each time. It isn't their job to do these technical things so if they don't have an active interest they aren't going to spend time learning it, so they can work out the exact sequence for next time unless it happens often enough that they learn by repetition. It isn't hard, but it isn't natural or familiar to many. It is only natural to you and I because we do that sort of thing regularly (or have done it enough in the past that it has become wired in).

[shiroiushi]

>And not just secretaries: higher paid managers & such too.

No, the managers were lazy and insisted on having secretaries print everything out for them, and refused to touch a keyboard.

>In fact them more so (as they would drop the task on a secretary, who would then enlist the office kid who knew some tech).

In my experience in a college, the secretaries could handle their computer-based duties by themselves just fine. They only called for help when they ran into a problem they hadn't encountered yet. But doing basic file management at the MS-DOS command line (this was before Windows) was within their ability.

>The issue with that was (still is) that they will need telling each time.

Yeah, so what? ryandrake above said "I recently had to have a non-technical person send me a very large file, and encountered this", so that's why I countered with this in response to his claim that "ftp is too big a technical hurdle for the guy". It doesn't matter if it isn't natural or familiar; all you have to do is cut-and-paste some simple commands. If you can't do that, you're hopelessly stupid I think. You don't even have to understand the commands! That's my whole point with the utility of a command-line interface in situations like this: you can give someone some explicit commands, and they should be able to follow them exactly, simply by cutting-and-pasting or typing them in. It's not like a GUI interface where you have to try to tell them (perhaps over the phone) exactly where to click, which isn't reliable since you may not be able to exactly duplicate their environment or they might be using a different program or even OS. If you're somehow smart enough to use a computer with a GUI for years (and likely multiple computers: smartphone + PC), but you're too stupid to open a terminal window and cut-and-paste a one-line command, this sounds to me like "willful ignorance".

Anyway, the point is that this is fine for a rare occurrence like this. It doesn't sound like ryandrake has to deal with this problem with this same person on a daily basis.