Generally speaking, when I’m using file transfer services, I like to stick to the classics like Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive. Each one has its pros and cons, but overall, they all tend to work. As I’ve noted previously, my swiss army knife is Dropbox, bar none. Simply put, it’s just the fastest upload speed and the fastest way to send files or receive files. It’s a bit clunky to use, and not every feature is exposed seamlessly. But it works reliably. Plus, its built-in commenting features and all that other jazz just makes things collaborating so much smoother.

Contrast that with my experience with WeTransfer. I was dealing with their service from another client who was sending me about 200 gigabytes of video. I managed to download every single video except these two large videos, each one being 86 gigs. Normally I would grab these kind of files via SSH or through SFTP or Dropbox. But this time, my client insisted on using WeTransfer.

Sending large files is a problem as old as computers themselves with questions like: is it faster to mail the file than it is to download? You’d think that with today’s download speeds, it should be easier to just download what I need at full blast. I also depend on native clients and protocols for file transfer because they have built-in resuming functions, they can deal with block by block data, they have delta uploads and downloads, all the little features that make it much easier when there are unstable network conditions.

WeTransfer insists on using a browser for all connections. I’ve been trying to download this 86 gigabyte file for the last four days, and through multiple different browsers, whether it’s Google Chrome or Dia or something else, it just kept getting canceled around the 50 or 60 gigabyte mark. Imagine if you have a bandwidth limit with your Internet provider. Thank God I don’t, but if you do, this is pretty frustrating because you’re downloading it and then all of a sudden, it just fails. Or in Chrome’s parlance, it’s “Cancelled” which makes no sense, because clearly that wasn’t me!

And as I’m wont to do, I started searching on GitHub, and other clients, trying to investigate if there was a native wraparound client or wrapper client or something that can access it through the API.

But it didn’t seem like there was anything, except for the WeTransfer iOS app. Lo and behold, I went and I downloaded the app, I loaded up the link onto the app. It has such a weird user experience. For instance, there’s no way to select files unless you hold down on a file to select one file to download.

Plus, I had to free up storage on my phone because obviously 86 gigs is a lot to download. And in standard iOS strangeness and limitations, I kept my screen alive at all times via the Settings app because, of course, Apple loves to notoriously kill background apps and transfers very quickly if they don’t have a whiff of being in the foreground.

So with this contrived setup, I was finally able to see the file download, only to try to save it, and then iOS would not save it even though I had the requisite storage space (!). So I had to plug in my SanDisk drive to my iPhone and then save the file to it. And I’m waiting patiently for the i/o of iOS to save the file to it. And that failed too!

Now I saved it to my Photo Library since it failed to save to my Files app. I am attempting to AirDrop it to my computer. Who knows if this will work.

Moral of the story, file systems are still complicated (in my option, unnecessarily so). We have not resolved the nitty gritty bits, especially when it comes to 4K recordings and other high bandwidth files. And now, more camera manufacturers trying to introduce 8K recordings and RAW files that take up gobs of bandwidth. With gigabit internet still missing in large swaths of America, how do we transfer all this stuff to each other? You can’t just AirDrop it all (maybe old school sneaker net? hah!)

We need more robust internet in the US and other places, to enable these type of transfers. Please, for the love of God, we need more bandwidth!

Also, for those of you using WeTransfer, please give us alternative transfer tools that actually have good native tool support and not just rely on the browser. Clearly, HTTP is not enough to grab such big files. Or at least support Internet Download Managers because that would make a big difference with changing network conditions.