First and foremost, Dropbox is a cloud storage company. You sign up to a plan, upload your files, and then you can access them anywhere and on any device with an internet connection. This in itself is extremely useful and puts Dropbox as a competitor with the likes of Google Drive and Microsoft One Drive.
The Cloud is more than a one trick pony though, and Dropbox is now looking to offer its users another extremely useful feature for both personal and enterprise use. You’ll get no prizes, however, for guessing what Dropbox’s newly announced Dropbox Transfer feature is all about.
Dropbox Transfer could allow you to easily transfer files up to 100GB in size
It wasn’t long ago that we told you about Mozilla’s new Firefox Send feature. Firefox Send offers a quick, easy, and free way to send files up to 1GB in size or 2.5GB in size, if you sign up. Dropbox is now moving into this space too but is offering something a little different to the offering from Mozilla. According to the Dropbox blog post announcing Dropbox Transfer, users will be able to send up to 100GB of files at once using the new feature.
Dropbox is looking at the limits placed on users by their email clients. Usually, you can only send files up to 25MB in size via email, which isn’t much in today’s digital-first world. Most smartphone cameras these days capture images that are bigger than 25MB and you can forget about emailing somebody a copy of that video you recorded on your last holiday.
As Dropbox is trying to solve an email related problem, the company is looking to make the process as simple as possible and in this way the new Transfer service is a little similar to Firefox Send.
As well as being able to transfer files already uploaded to Dropbox, users will be able to simply drag and drop their files onto the Dropbox Transfer uploader. Once they’ve done this their files will upload and they’ll receive a link, which they’re then free to share. Transfer will also offer the ability to send the file in an automatically generated email.
Like with Firefox Send, Dropbox Transfer also gives users the ability to add a password to their link, in case it falls into the wrong hands, and set an expiration date when the link will stop working.
There doesn’t seem to be download limit feature like users of Firefox Send will have access to but a cool Dropbox Transfer feature is the ability to change the expiration date and download password even after the link has been shared. Users will also get download notifications and will be able to see how many times their files have been downloaded.
Dropbox Transfer is currently in the beta testing stage of development, so it isn’t rolling out to all Dropbox users just yet. Once it does though, it’ll offer unique transferring capabilities to them. If you or your business are looking for a way to transfer large files, this could be something worth keeping an eye on.
