Frustration with Cumbersome File Sharing
Users are experiencing significant frustration with existing file sharing methods, which are often slow, inconvenient, involve repeated uploads, raise privacy concerns, or lack self-hosting options. They seek simpler, faster, and more secure ways to share files directly, often bypassing traditional cloud storage. This pain point has led some to build their own solutions or actively search for alternatives.
SOURCES (60)
“I primarily use PBS. I do weekly VM-level backups to my NAS and keep 5 versions. Then I do a monthly backup to B2, retaining only one copy. I use Syncthing on my laptops to send versioned copies to my NAS, and then that gets…”
“Nobody took your first question. There's no note ceiling in Notion. What caps you is the upload. The free plan allows 5 MB per file, so a big Keep export lands in batches either way. One thing on top of the Takeout answer above. Takeout writes both .html and .json per note. Use the JSON. Labels, pinned state and dates sit there as fields, and the HTML buries them in markup.”
“LiveShareIt has been around for a bit, and the product has changed quite a lot recently. The basic idea is pretty simple: open a room, share the link, and start working together. No signup needed. People can share code/text, send files, use a collaborative whiteboard, and jump on a video call in the same room. One feature I’ve been playing with lately is the AI whiteboard. Instead of starting from a blank canvas, you can type something like “draw a system design for a URL shortener” and it creat”
“How far apart are the servers? How quick is the network? How much data is there? What is the target time for the copy? These are all questions a professional would ask and in some circumstances network based copy tools are simply inappropriate. A better solution is to get a spare raid array, sync it with the source server in mirror mode. Split the mirror and take the spare array to the target, connect and mount etc. Now you can transfer hundreds of TBs of data as quickly as you can carry them fr”
“Probably not going to be a popular answer given the sub, but I've tried the whole invidious/newpipe/whatever thing before and it's a massive hassle for zero tangible gain (as opposed to, for example, hosting the ARR stack, which does provide massive tangible benefits even if it gets a little finicky). if your goal is to have a largely untarnished "YouTube Experience", the best way to achieve that is by using modified clients with full ad blocking/sponsor blocking suites and log”
“& if you switch to "New link format > Relative path to file" in link settings, the wikilinks become portable across devices without breaking.”
“Can you still upload on a shared album with upload enabled on immich public proxy ?”
“Seems like it's probably gonna be easier to rip out the core file server and build a new interface on top of it, potentially with an intermediate API if needed”
“Understood, thanks! Being stored locally, does it mean that potentially I would not be able to sync it across devices on a free service tier?”
“i think the biggest hurdle isn't the tech explanation, it's the domain name sounding exactly like one of those spammy free converter sites that plaster "no upload!!" badges everywhere while running three analytics trackers in the background the site itself looks clean but the trust thing is mostly vibe-based for most people, having the source code visible somewhere would probably do more heavy lifting than any copy on the landing page, even if 90% of users never look at it next”
“Like you I wanted this few years ago but also other services like downloading stuff, a media library and everything that comes with being self-reliant outside of the big Google, Apple, etc. I wanted to have a place to host all my pictures and data so I could stop paying for cloud. First OS I turned to was OpenMediaVault. It was free, i had hardware that it could run this on available. It worked. The hardware wasn't really powerful, it was a Raspberry Pi. I was often troubleshooting it. Then”
“Update: after messing around with GitHub as a solution for a while I got frustrated, gave up and bought a year of Obsidian sync. I did get a new, higher paying job offer earlier this week so that made me feel better about going the easy route.”
“I'm currently running into this problem with our entra joined devices. We have a server: fileshare.domain.com and a shared folder on the server, if the user maps to the shared folder using: \fileshare.domain.com\folder they have no issue if they use the namespace that was setup \team\folder it will not map. i'm wracking my brain trying to figure this one out”
“cool idea but how does it integrate? do they get a link and have to vote on a website or can click something directly in the respective aps? like: do they get a message from your service where they have an actual visible poll in their whatsapp/telegram/discord chat?”
“Two of these are different problems, and the file share answers only solve one of them. For files, sync beats a share in your case. You said you want to take the laptop outside and keep working, and an SMB or NFS mount stops existing the second you leave the network. Syncthing keeps a real local copy on all four machines and reconciles them when they meet again. For the browser side, the thing people miss is that Firefox Sync is self hostable. syncstorage-rs gives you history, open tabs and sess”
“I have a windows PC, a macbook, a chromeos laptop and a linux server lol, Alot of the times I need to be able to access files on one OS, or get my browser history/sessions from one OS so I can easily get off my PC, take my laptop outside and continue working.. so I've been looking for repos to self host that would make this easier/more productive.. The things I've found so far are usually closed source (like parsec) and I believe there are other open soruce options for RDP just dont know”
“Hi everyone, Originally, I started developing a file transfer tool for a film studio for internal use. Their main problem was that they had to send terabytes of raw footage to a partner across Europe on a daily basis. They first tried WeTransfer, but it just wasn't efficient enough for these sizes. Massive.io was way too expensive. They even tried torrenting—they loved that you don't have to wait for the upload to finish before downloading—but the lack of encryption was a dealbreaker. It”
“hi im looking for some web based thing that i can run like FilePizza, in fact my only issue with FilePizza is that its unbelievably slow, i only get like 150kb when using it and i have no idea why, i want it to be a minimalistic as in you just drop in a file, and get a link you can send someone, without any rooms or anything, or code based sharing without also supporting just copying a link, it has turned out to be surprisingly hard to find something this specific that actually works well”
“I've got stuff I want to access all the time (like files on SeaDrive and photos on Immich). I don't really like the idea of just being connected to Tailscale all the time, because I really love using adguard's http filtering on my devices (which needs a VPN of its own) and it seems like it adds some overhead for the 95% of the work that I want to do that doesn't actually need to be on my home network. mTLS seemed like the solution and I set it up using Caddy on my server (domain”
“Anyone using Azure files for file shares for remote employees? I have seen horror stories in the past but saw some positive reviews on it recently. I am an Entra ID, cloud only shop and the new updates to the service look promising. submitted by /u/DickBalczak [link] [comments]”
“I’ve been using this and it’s been reliable. Maybe not the most feature rich, but works perfectly fine as a Dropbox alternative, allowing me to share files with others, or allowing others to safely drop files onto my server.”
“I finally got around to installing Tailscale (why did I put it off for so long) and can successfully access my *arr apps from outside my home network. While I'm motivated, the next thing that's been on my to do list for too long is a dropbox type backup solution. I'm only really looking for what Dropbox was at its release - a synced folder from my computer to my server - with little fluff. Up until now all I've done is map a network drive in Windows and copy/paste files when I re”
“We have dedicated SP sites for external sharing that only limited users have access to. Otherwise its turned off.”
“For one family event I'd make a guest upload page behind a long random slug. Write straight to object storage with a per-file size cap. Strip GPS EXIF before showing the shared gallery.”
“I have a family function coming up and want to host a way to easily upload photos. Is there a good way to do this? submitted by /u/NotTobyFromHR [link] [comments]”
“Cool. For reference, in currently using https://paste.rs/ but its not private so I would prefer something self-hosted”
“The upload is only via the UI for now, that's a good suggestion, we'll add it to the roadmap.”
“mayo.pizza is a wild name for a file transfer tool but i kind of respect it. way better than another generic.io domain”
“Same experience. Syncthing is both reliable end versatile at the same time. I sync freetube cache, work files, mpd playlists, etc. The most practical thing I do is sync Paperless’s consume directory. I move files into the consume directory on any client, Paperless processes them and deletes them from the consume directory, and they disappear from all the clients. Plus, the UI is clean.”
“a simple, S3-agnostic, open-source alternative to WeTransfer, Dropbox and Palmr . FWIW, Palmr is dead.”
I use Tella for hosted videos that can be shared with another.
“Can you share from any other software? Sharing is not common in the desktop world... You usually save files somewhere and at most use drag and drop.”
“I've had that thought before... Since this is a static application hosted on Cloudflare Pages, you can audit every line of source code that's executed or compile it and run it yourself locally to make sure that not a single byte is sent to an intermediary server.”
“The app uses direct P2P architecture via WebRTC. this means that: Your data travels directly from your browser to the recipient’s browser, with end-to-end encryption. No files are transmitted, stored, or processed on third-party intermediate servers. The code is 100% open source and native client-server, so you can inspect the network in your browser’s developer tab and verify that there is no outgoing traffic to any hidden servers.”
“a tool that automatically organizes my downloads folder by file type and project, i got like 800 files just sitting there since january and i'm too lazy to sort them manually. would pay maybe $5/month if it just worked in background without me thinking about it”
“rsync or rclone should be able to do this. If those are text files, I think git would be better.”
“Your best bet is segregate work flows and use cases to different apps/solutions. Immich for images, jellyfin for movies, gitea for work files or personal projects maybe, cwa for books, etc. Trying to keep everything all in onedrive (or any app) will be problematic. That said these other services require self hosted solutions including a server online at home. So there’s some setup required.”
“Syncthing. But as far as I know you cannot sync on demand, you would need full 400 gb space locally.”
“We also follow this approach, as well as only allowing a specific security group with sharing ability.”
“Most of my customers have it enabled but rhen you have to think about otherways of protecting the data like Purview”
“I could list the "big" apps (ie Jellyfin etc) like others have, but that's a waste of time. One I haven't seen listed yet is Karakeep. It is most definitely my most used app that isn't one of the "big" ones listed many times over already in the thread.”
“We have historically had external filesharing disabled in our M365 tenant for security purposes. We are getting more and more request to enable the feature. I'm currently in discussions with leadership about the security implications of enabling external sharing. There is a business need for it and not enabling it is leading to shadow IT workarounds. I'd like to take r/sysadmin 's pulse on this topic. Is it enabled in your org do you do any active monitoring of files shared outside t”
“+1 to Filebrowser Quantum, seeing as its one of my most used daily apps I originally spun up Copyparty as it was recommended as a good file manager, but it was super busy on the eyes, and Filebrowser Quantum was a lovely balance between simplicity and enough functionality for me”