Tony's Quick Tutorials #1: How to Transfer Large Files

Transferring Files Too Large to Email

by Tony Bove

Just remember this: if the file is over four, it won't go through the door. (Four megabytes, that is; and the door is email.)

Attaching a file to an email message is the most popular method of transferring a file to someone. But there is a limit to what you can attach and get away with. Most email servers in the world -- systems that process email messages and either route them to other servers or route them to recipients -- won't accept an attachment larger than five megabytes; some won't accept larger than four.

Well, heck, just about every media file you create or juggle in an iLife application is larger than four megabytes. A song is typically five or ten megabytes; a slideshow saved as a QuickTime file might be at least that large; and a digital video movie is way up there at about one gigabyte for five minutes. How can you transfer those to others?

If they share your local-area network (LAN), you can share your files. If they don't, you can use the Internet.

On a LAN You Can Share Forever

On a local-area network (LAN), all you need to do is allow personal file sharing on your computer. Sounds like a liberal thing to do, inviting all sorts of mischief and voyeurism, but you can control what others can do. (The reverse is true: if someone wants to make a file or folder available to you over a LAN, all they have to do is enable personal file sharing, following the same instructions in this article.)

To turn on personal file sharing, open System Preferences, and click on the Sharing icon. The Sharing preferences should appear, just like Figure 1, with the Services pane front and center. Select Personal File Sharing in the list of settings and click the Start button. Sharing takes just a moment to set up (as your computer blushes), and when it is ready, a check mark appears next to Personal File Sharing and the Start button turns into a Stop button.

Figure 1: Enabling personal file sharing in the Sharing preferences.

You have control over who can do what with your folders and files with these options:

Public folder with Drop Box -- guests can copy files, but they can't go beyond the Public folder. After enabling personal file sharing, put the files to be shared in your Public folder. Anyone on your LAN can use the Go>Connect to Server command in the Mac OS X Finder to log into your computer as a guest and copy files from your Public folder and to the Drop Box within your Public folder. A guest can't go anywhere else (unless he is James Bond, Agent 007, sneaking in through a window wearing a tuxedo).
Sharing with an authorized user that can copy files and folders. For this to work, you have to first set up an account for the authorized person (or people), and then tell them how to use the Go>Connect to Server command. Setting up an account is easy to do:

In System Preferences, click on the Accounts icon. Your accounts appear in a list (you may only have one at this time).
Create a new account. Click the New User button to create another account, as shown in Figure 2, and type an account name, a password for the account (enter twice to verify), and a password hint (to display in case the person forgets the password). Choose a picture, and decide whether or not to allow the user to log in from a Windows-based PC. The system creates a new home directory for that account in the Users folder of your hard disk.
Tell them the information they need to log on to your Mac. Tell them the name of your Mac, the account name to use to log in, and the account password.
Tell them how to use the Go>Connect to Server command in Mac OS X. Give them these instructions: After choosing Go>Connect to Server, a list of servers and computers on the LAN appears, as shown in Figure 3. Select the computer or server, and click the Connect button, then log in to the computer or server with the appropriate name and password, as shown in Figure 4.
Tell them which home directory to select. The home directory and any disk drives available on the computer appear in a list for the person to choose, as in Figure 5. Tell the person to choose the appropriate disk drive or home directory, and click Connect. That's it. Now they can access the that directory just like any disk drive on their Macs, using the Finder to copy files and folders.

Figure 2: Creating a new user account for one or more people to share files and folders.

Figure 3: Connecting to a computer or server on the LAN from another computer.

Figure 4: Logging into the other computer on the LAN with name and password.

Figure 5: Choosing the home directory (or other directory) of the computer on the LAN to mount as a "drive" in the Finder.

What others can do in your folders and with your files depends entirely on how you've set up the Ownership & Permissions section of the folder's Info window. Select the folder, choose File>Get Info, and click the arrow next to Ownership & Permissions to open the section. Pop-up menus provide access capabilities you can assign to others, including defined groups. "Read only" means files can be copied from the folder, but not to the folder. "Write only" provides a drop-box that people can copy to, but not from. "Read & Write" provides full access.

We Can Share with Windows, We Can Copy Files

Mac OS X makes it real easy to share files with Windows computers. Let's say you have Winnie the Pooh whining about how he'd love to get your music files, and can't you just dump them into his Windows laptop from your Mac? Of course you can, but he has to fiddle with Windows to make that work. You can tell him to go look up file sharing on Windows, somewhere in Lesson 496 in Section 42 of his Windows tutorial book...

And while he tries to figure out Windows file sharing, you can quickly set up an account on your Mac for him to log in from Windows. Then you can interrupt his sojourn into the Windows wilderness with instructions on how to log onto your Mac from his Windows laptop. Here's what you do:

On your Mac, enable Windows file sharing. Open the Sharing preferences (refer to Figure 1) in System Preferences, and select Windows File Sharing in the list of settings. Click the Start button.
Create an account for those who are logging in from Windows. Click the New User button to create an account (refer to Figure 2) and type its name, password, and so on.
In the account, enable Windows log in. Turn on the option to "allow user to log in from Windows" and click OK. The account creates a new home directory for that account in the Users folder of your hard disk.
Copy folders or files to share into the account's home directory. Make duplicate copies of the folders or files and drag the duplicate copies into the new account's home directory (in the Users folder).
Tell the person the account name and password to use to log into your computer. On a Windows PC, the person can find your computer in the Windows Network Neighborhood.

On the other hand, you could access his Windows computer from your Mac. All you need is a valid user ID and password for an account on the Windows computer (without one, you can still use the method outlined above). You can go right to that account's Home directory on the Windows computer, and use your Mac to copy folders and files to and from the Windows computer:

Set the Windows computer to share a folder of files on a network. In Windows XP, you can open My Computer and browse for the folder, then choose File>Sharing and Security and turn on the options for Network sharing and security.
Choose Go>Connect to Server on your Mac. A list of servers appears in your Connect to Server window.
Choose MSHOME in the list of computers and servers. The names of any Windows-based PCs on the LAN appear in the right column.
Select a Windows-based PC by name, and log in. Log in with your account name and password, and then choose the shared folder on the Windows machine. The Windows folder appears just like a Mac hard disk in your Finder.

Don't Need No Freakin' Transfer Protocol?

Sharing over the Internet is more complex, involving use of the File Transfer Protocol (FTP). While it is easy to download a file from a Web page or an FTP site with any browser (all you need is the Web or FTP address, and a user ID and password if the site is protected), you can't send a file to a protected site with most browsers, unless the site is set up for this function. (One easy way to share your files is to use the .Mac service to create a Web page that accommodates anyone with the right password to visit and download files you put there. That's a topic for another article.)

To make it easy for others to copy files to and from your computer at their convenience, you can turn on FTP Access for your Mac. To do this, open System Preferences, click on the Sharing icon, and click the Services tab (refer to Figure 1). Turn on the FTP Access option. A message appears at the bottom of the Sharing window providing the address of your FTP server on your Mac -- something like "ftp://192.168.1.246/". Give this address to anyone with an account on your computer, and they can access files and folders using a Web browser, FTP client such as Fetch, or the Go>Connect to Server command in Mac OS X.

How about transferring files to other FTP sites, such as a password-protected site that requires use of an FTP client? Here are several options:

Use an FTP client, such as Fetch. You can find Fetch at http://fetchsoftworks.com/ for $25 as of this writing. You can use it for several weeks before paying for it.
Use the FTP function inside another application, such as Macromedia Dreamweaver.
Use the free Terminal application supplied with Mac OS X, found in the Utilities folder inside your Applications folder, which offers FTP (see sidebar).

Fetch provides an easy drag-and-drop interface for transferring any type of file with FTP servers. Once you've established a connection with the FTP server by typing the appropriate information (the FTP server name, your ID, your password, and the directory you have access to) as shown in Figure 6, you can drag files to and from the FTP server window using the Finder as shown in Figure 7, or you can browse folders to select files and then use the Get and Put Files buttons.

Figure 6: Setting up an FTP connection in Fetch.

Figure 7: Dragging a file into the Fetch FTP server window to send the file to the server.

You can send an entire folder of files, such as an album of songs or a photo album of photos, by stuffing the folder (or even a set of folders) into a compressed file. StuffIt Deluxe from Alladin Systems (www.stuffit.com) can compress the folder into one ".zip" or StuffIt file (".zip" is a standard for Windows-based PCs). You can then transfer the ".zip" file to the FTP server in one step. The compressed file is smaller and takes less time to transfer, and offers a compact way of sending an entire folder of files.

Terminal Command

The free Terminal application offers the old-style command line interface used by Unix systems. Yikes, you say -- we have evolved way beyond typing two-letter commands you have to memorize. True, but if you learn these simple commands, you can use this method on any Unix system on the planet:

1. Launch the Terminal application, and a window appears for typing command lines.

2. Type ftp followed by a space and the IP address or URL of the FTP server, and press the Return key. For example, the following connects you to the "ftp3.myserver.com" server:

ftp ftp://ftp3.myserver.com

When you see "Name:" type your user ID for the FTP server, and press Return.

3. If you see "Password:" type your password and press Return. (Public sites sometimes do not require password-protected access.)

4. To upload a file, type Put followed by a space, the destination folder (or path to a folder) followed by a space, and the path and filename of the file to upload; then press the Return key. The following example puts the file "chapter2.doc" in the Documents folder of user "tony" (which is in the Users folder on the Macca1 disk) into the dropbox folder of the FTP server:

put /dropbox Macca1/Users/tony/Documents/chapter2.doc

5. To download a file, type Get followed by a space, the path and filename of the file to download followed by a space, and the path to your destination folder; then press the Return key. The following example gets the file "outline.doc" in the Samples directory of the FTP server, and places it in the Documents folder of user "tony" on the Macca1 hard disk:

Get /Samples/outline.doc Macca1/Users/tony/Documents/

6. Type exit and press Return to log out of the FTP server. You can then quit the Terminal application.

Other useful commands are ls to list the contents of a directory, and cd followed by a space and a directory name to change to that directory. (But lsd has no effect whatsoever.)

Tony Bove has been a Mac book author since 1985 (and has a computer museum in an old shed out back to prove it). His latest set of books, iLife All-In-One Reference for Dummies and iPod and iTunes for Dummies, are available at Amazon and fine bookstores everywhere. To contact him by email, all you need is his last name, the you-know-what symbol, and rockument.com.