Six Offbeat Ways to Share Files Online–Free

The web is now full of various free solutions you can turn to to share files online with co-workers, but they vary in their utility for various kinds of sharing. Some are very easy to jump in and out of, some can take you directly from sharing a file into a full-blown online meeting, some are very appropriate for moving huge files around, etc. In this post, I’ll round up six different, free ways you can share files online, with the strengths of each.

FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox, and is one of the fastest ways to use FTP to share very large files (such as video files) online. It’s basically like having a slick FTP client within Firefox. It handles multiple accounts with the varying login information that they require, supports SSL for secure sharing, and can do directory synchronizations if you want to make sure a series of large files in a directory matches up with another directory.


Tubes is a P2P-like, free service you can use to securely share files and media with others. One of several interesting aspects of it is that it can generate an on-the-fly web site for you and co-workers to use to share files.

Leaf Networks is a free online networking service. It lets you and co-workers instantly create your own private, secure network on the web. It’s also a great way to do secure collaboration from, say, public Wi-Fi hotspots. Leaf is akin to having a LAN that you share resources on, except you can think of the Leaf Networks service as an online hosted LAN solution. You can add others you would like to share files with to your network in a fashion similar to adding buddies to an instant messaging buddy list.

Drop.io was the subject of a recent post I did on online storage. This very unusual application is a good one to turn to for very quick-and-dirty files you want to share back-and-forth with co-workers or clients. When you upload a file to Drop.io (a drop), it creates a web site to store it in. You can password protect the files, and just provide a link to your intended recipient for accessing the file. There isn’t much security beyond passwords, but neither you nor your recipient has to register to do a fast file exchange.

In the same post I just linked to above, I also discussed Xdrive, which gives you a whopping 5GB of online storage that you could use to share files with others by simply sharing login information.

Finally, what if you don’t really need to actually transfer files to others but you want to view them together from remote locations? My free tool of choice for Windows, Mac, and Linux users for that is Yugma. It’s actually a full-blown online meeting application but it makes it super easy to transfer control of various desktops around a virtual meeting and share information.

Do you have any good tips on free ways to share files and collaborate?

loading

Comments have been disabled for this post