While we do not condone piracy or copyright infringement in any form, the truth is that there are a lot of very useful files, programs, ebooks, white papers, research reports and more on the Internet’s numerous file sharing website services out there.
These days, there is less concern about sharing or hosting files on your own online profile or via one of the big free services like Live Spaces, Dropbox, and so on. However, there are still times where it would be better if particular files were not associated so closely with your name (competitor information, for example). And, even with generous online storage limits and high bandwidth traffic limits capable of handling most legitimate sharing purposes, there are still occasions where hosting on a dedicated file sharing service is better.
There are literally hundreds of online file sharing services, but some of the most popular are Rapidshare, Hotfiles, Depositfiles, and Fileshare. These file sharing websites offer anonymous free file hosting storage and sharing with varying features. You can require a password to access files or just allow anyone who gets the URL to be able to download the file.
Free Online File Host Services
Unlike social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter, or specific purpose file sharing services like Flickr and Photobucket, the file sharing websites like Rapidshare and Depositfiles allow users to share any type of file. They also allow bigger files to be uploaded and most importantly do not require files to be associated with the user wishing to host the files online.
Therefore, a user could host all manner of controversial, topical, or large files and documents with little fear of repercussions or harassment.
For a researcher, access to exactly this type of books, research reports, notes, and white papers is very important. Rather than waiting days (or weeks) for an interlibrary loan of a doctoral dissertation written by a Harvard PhD candidate or just as long for one of the numerous law journals or other publications produced at colleges and universities around the country, an electronic version can often be found online with some diligent searching, or even with the help of a friendly librarian or fellow researchers.
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The catch to this utopia of free file hosting and unlimited bandwidth downloading for free is that it is not really free at all. Rather, each file hosting service permits anonymous users to download a small amount of material at a time. Some services go so far as to restrict free downloads to just one file per day or some equally low amount of megabytes in a 24 hour period. To get around this restriction, the file host offers a premium membership for a monthly fee or annual fee.
File Sharing Collaboration Strategy for Business
In theory, paying for access to unlimited files shared online would be a good business strategy. However, there are simply too many of these file sharing services out there, and it seems that every uploader has their favorite. To buy memberships to all of them would be absurd. Even a collection of premium memberships to Rapidshare and a handful of other major players could cost hundreds of dollars per month, not to mention the administrative burden of managing all of the premium accounts, usernames and passwords.
It is a situation crying out for a type of co-op where researchers, freelance writers, students, and others could each purchase a premium membership to one of the file sharing services and then share access between members of the cooperative. Of course, that requires either the insecure sharing of passwords and usernames while hoping for the best, or waiting on the person with the right membership to find download and then either re-upload or otherwise distribute the files needed to the original requester. Some sort of online service could manage the process for individual coops, but would need to be low profile to avoid being banned or blocked by the sharing services.
In the meantime, there is a very elegant solution allowing users to download for free from any file host like RapidShare, DepositFiles, HotFiles, and more. It is an open-source program called JDownloader. JDownloader works by handling all of the waiting, logging in, and downloading of files on the file hosts. If a captcha must be entered, JDownloader displays an unobtrusive pop-up box at the necessary time and the user can quickly enter the required Captcha without having to monitor a timer or countdown manually.
Furthermore, the software will wait on the user’s behalf for the next free time to open up, whether that is one hour or 24 hours and then automatically start downloading the requested files. It is not an instant process by any means, but online research requests can be queued up and then retrieved over a few hour or overnight if necessary.
JDownloader monitors the clipboard for URLs and then automatically adds them to its download queue to be reviewed by the user before the downloads are started. Downloading a dozen links off of a website requires simply right-clicking and choosing Copy URL for each link. No real waiting is required, because by the time the user can copy a new URL to the clipboard, JDownloader has already added it to the list of file downloads.
If you need to get a handful of books or files off of multiple file sharing websites, give JDownloader a try. It might just be the solution you are looking for… at least until I figure out that co-op thing… or someone beats me to it 🙂
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Free file sharing storage downloading is complete.
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I enjoy this program as well. Makes downloading a lot easier, and you can check all the download links to make sure they are working, before you start downloading.
What a wonderful utility! This is going to save me from a lot of frustration in the future. It isn’t that Rapidshare is difficult to use–I just have the attention span of a fruit fly. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve initiated a download, become bored watching the timer tick down, switched to another tab for “a few seconds”, and forgotten about the whole thing until 15 minutes later.