Across industries, running a business today means wrangling many different types of files – Word documents, PDFs, photographs, video, and more – and while this can be easy with relatively small files, the larger the file, the more complicated the situation is. How, then, should your business opt to send large files? There are a lot of different choices, and which one your business chooses will depend on several factors.
In-House Transfer: Use A USB
Are all the staff working with particular files in-house, sharing an office space? If so, one of the simplest ways to transfer files, even large ones, is by not really transferring them at all. Instead of transmitting the files over the cloud or another internet-based tool, staff can simply place files on a USB drive. It may seem a bit retro, but USB drives are much larger than they used to be – you can buy tiny drives equivalent to old external hard drives for very little money – and then staff can quickly trade off files as needed.
For Collaboration: Consider Cloud Management
One of the top priorities for today’s business is, of course, productivity, and despite years of fighting against it, the pandemic has proven that enabling remote working can benefit workplace productivity.
That being said, transferring files when some staff are remote, especially when multiple team members need to collaborate, can be a difficult undertaking. Files inevitably get duplicated, people make edits to out-of-date versions, and everyone gets frustrated.
If you want to send large files, while ensuring that everyone has the most current versions and without the difficulty associated with constantly updating files and fussing over transfers, consider using a cloud-based storage and sharing platform. These platforms are flexible enough to support a wide range of file types, while also keeping everyone on the same page.
Go Old School: Opt For An FTP
FTP (file transfer protocol) is an older way to transfer large files, but it has survived as a convenient way of getting big, often complex files from one place to another. The one major upside now, though, is that it’s much easier to access a desktop FTP platform and they’re compatible with all operating systems. Typically, FTPs are only used to move a large file to an end destination – think a publication to a printer or a substantial product like a marketing package to a client – but they’re consistent, so they’re not going anywhere.
These are just three ways to transfer large files, and there are many more, but the reality is that most businesses rely on multiple approaches on a day-to-day basis, and that makes sense. After all, you can easily send a one or two-page document to a coworker over email or even your in-house chat platform, but whereas you’ll want a central place to store large, ongoing projects.
Your goal shouldn’t be to pick one approach to file transfer and use it exclusively, but rather to select a suite of tools and dispatch them strategically based on the file type, situation, and other variables. Now that’s the real definition of efficiency!
