Sending a Folder with 60+ MB Files
 

iMac Lion,

I have DICOM MRI Images I need to send to several Doctors for evaluation.

The folder is 66 MB with about about 50 files.

I know there are many services for sending large files, but I do not want to upload 60 files. I want to select the Folder and email the contents.

Does anyone have and recommendations for APP services that can do this job.

Thanks

I can not seem to find anything on the internet that will do this.

Dropbox is probably the easiest way to go. It puts a folder on your Mac, and anything you put in there will sync to the cloud, and you can then right click on the folder to share a link to it.

Dropbox automatically gives you 2 GB of free space to use.

Use this link and you and I will each get an additional 500 MB of space: http://db.tt/69ezm2L4

Don't want to use that link, then you can simply go to www.dropbox.com and sign up.

I get this request from the office regularly. Problem is, the biggest message you can email reliably is 10Mb. That's message size, not attachment size. Attachments grow 30% so that caps you at 7Mb.

You will hear people say "but I've sent 25Mb emails to my friend with mailservice.com". Sure. From X to Y using internet provider Z may work intermittently. I said "reliably".

Is this a one-time thing (your MRI images for diagnosis), or a regular commercial service you provide to doctors?

If the former, just use dropbox.

If the latter, set up a server in your office (your Mac came with all the necessary software) then you don't need to upload anything.

Before I started using Dropbox, I would use YouSendIt.com for this sort of thing. Would work fine for this situation, with no commitment.

Assuming he's providing a service to doctors and not just sending around his own scans, also assuming he's in the USA, then he can't use 3rd party services like dropbox and yousendit as that would be a HIPAA violation. Level 3 by the looks of it (willful neglect) with a minimum penalty of $10,000 per violation. It's not clear wether "per violation" means one per doctor, per case, or per document. But there's a $1.5 million annual cap on the fines, which must really suck if you get busted on both sides of New Years.

If you don't want to upload multiple files, just use tar or gzip or something to make them into one file. Even if you don't benefit from compression (presumably, being images, they're already compressed), at least then you have only one file to deal with.

How in Drop Box do I confirm that I successfully shared a Folder Link with the Drop Box Email Option. I did in fact send to an email a shared link but I can not find any where that the email was successfully sent.

I do not think I am doing right.

Comments?

With Dropbox sharing feature (which is great), you won't get any email confirmation (except if the recipient send you a "thank you" email by his own).

Other (free) services such as webcargo will do that. They will send you an email saying the file has been shared with XX and they will send you an other one when the recipient has downloaded the file.
(But you might need to ZIP the files or upload them individually, I can't remember)

For future instances I can think of two ways:

1) Include yourself in the recipients when using the Dropbox mail form.

2) Copy the link from the form Dropbox presents then compose the message in your usual email client (Mail, Entourage, etc.).

I'd be inclined to set up an sftp server with accounts as needed and tell people to "come and get it" (you could always e-mail them a link, to make it easy for them).

This has the advantage of allowing you to know (by account) got what files and when. If, you felt like it provided more security, you could also make the server only available during certain hours (for example, between 5PM and 8PM your time).

You don't really care that it was successfully sent, you care that it was successfully received. The only reliable way to do this is to have the recipient reply.

Dropbox always sends me an email when someone has shared a folder that I invited them to.

One of the shared folders has only 10 hours left, why, and how to I set how long to leave it in the Drop Box. Also it seems to set a limit for downloads of 37.0 k/B/sec.

Is that the max folder file download speed bandwidth allowed.

Network Speed with Dropbox
 

iMac Lion,

I have a question. Recently I started using Drop Box Forum recommendation to load several very large photo, picture files, about 1.75 GB.

I am noticing my Internet Speed upload and download speed have significantly dropped. I notice a lot of activity on the router. It is rapidly flashing and the DSL modem showing activity.

How do I tell if someone is accessing my network to verify that the shared files are indeed being downloaded? If Drop Box does not use my network then how do I tell why the network is being used via my router?

Something is going on and I am not sure why, or what????

Help?

Here is a help request I submitted to Drop Box regarding my network.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

"I have noticed since installing Drop Box yesterday and loading two large Folders (Myers, and Baltic) into Drop Box that today I am getting a lot of network activity on my wireless router. My DSL upload and download internet speeds have decreased substantially and the activity light on my router is continuously flashing.

So my question is how does Drop Box impact my network? How and when are these big files uploaded to you? Yesterday I Select Option Dragged the two Folders into the Drop Box Window and shared the folder with several folks, some show that they have accepted.

What is going on, and why today (Perhaps, I did not notice yesterday) am I getting the activity.

I had thought the Drop Box uploaded my files to the Drop Box Cloud so to share the files my computer does not have to be on, and my network does not need to used.

I confirmed today, that when I shut down the iMac Lion, the activity stopped on the router, and when I restarted the Mac the activity began again.

Please advise on what is going on here.

Why yesterday did some folks share the photo file. It must have been loaded yesterday so why today an I getting all this network activity."

Your ISP usually provides an Internet connection that is a lot faster for downloads than uploads. You are doing an upload (from your computer to the Dropbox server) and so you will be limited by whatever upload bandwidth is provided by your connection. 40 KB/sec would be a quite typical upload speed. But if you have 66 MB of files to upload, that should take less than an hour at 40 KB/sec.

In any case, when you upload something to Dropbox, you need to watch the Dropbox menu to see when it has finished uploading. After that, it should be available for others to see.

If the files have not yet finished uploading, that would explain the network activity.

I merged your other posting into this thread since it is all related. Best to keep it together. See my answer just above.

I see now that you are talking about files of total size about 1.8 GB - that's about 30 times larger than what you had said initially in this thread.
So the estimated time to upload those files is something like 30 times longer. Hence it is something like 14 hours instead of being less than one hour.
So it is quite understandable that you are seeing network activity - you will need to leave your Mac on and connected for something like 14 hours (or more) so the upload can finish.

So I understand it will take a long time to upload 1.2 GB in files. However, when I get a shared link for that file and click on it from an email all the pictures display, yet the file is still syncing. How can the pictures be accessible when the upload has not completed.

Magic? Or maybe Dropbox is somehow just showing you the files that are already on your local hard disk?
Or maybe those are just previews of the files that you are seeing?

Downloading Dropbox Folder and files
 

So the Dropbox finally finished syncing and all looks good in the Dropbox folder, photos and videos.

So I sent the shared folder two ways, one from the Dropbox App, the other from an email link to the Dropbox Photo folder.

How do the receivers of the shared folder that do not want to establish an Dropbox account (required when receiving a shared folder from the Dropbox app) download the folder to their iPad, Mac.

The folks that linked the email folder could view the files in the folder but had no way to download the folder.

For people who don't have a Dropbox account, you can give them a link to access the folder. That will open in their web browser and they can download files from there.