How to transfer a big file?

October 12, 2005 11:26 AM

I want to get a file from my mac to my pc -- the file is just slightly too big to fit on a CD-R.

Is there any way to break it into parts? (I've tried gmailing it to myself, but the browser crashes.) Other suggestions also welcome.

posted by Tlogmer to Computers & Internet (14 answers total)

Are the machines close to one another? You can plug the ethernet connection of the mac to the pc. The mac will automatically make the regular network cable into a null cable.
posted by srburns at 11:30 AM on October 12, 2005

You can't zip it?
posted by smackfu at 11:33 AM on October 12, 2005

A second vote for yousendit.com
posted by briank at 11:51 AM on October 12, 2005

dropload.com will allow you to send up to 100Mb.
posted by dontrockwobble at 11:51 AM on October 12, 2005

Compress it into more than one part. Stuff It, the standard Mac compression tool, has a Windows version - and I think both WinRar and WinZip can uncompress multivolume .sit files. In OSX you can obviously use tar and gzip too (tar -L ). The Windows programs can deal with it too.
posted by nkyad at 11:52 AM on October 12, 2005

I think the ethernet cable would have to be a crossover cable, right?
posted by argybarg at 11:57 AM on October 12, 2005

Mac ethernet ports are auto-crossing
posted by jeb at 11:57 AM on October 12, 2005

Another vote for yousendit.com - they allow you to send up to 1gb.
posted by coach_mcguirk at 12:01 PM on October 12, 2005

Response by poster: I ended up transferring over the network (which I'd assumed I wouldn't be able to figure out). Thanks, all.
posted by Tlogmer at 12:10 PM on October 12, 2005

yousend it is great, but it would take forever for a file > 680MB!
posted by yonation at 12:56 PM on October 12, 2005

if you know unix, the unix utility "split" (in conjunction with "cat" to reassemble it) might have been useful to you, though you'd need cygwin or something installed on the pc to use cat.

e.g. "split -b 10000000 ../file" in an empty directory will generate, alphabetically named, however many 10 meg files would be needed for the input file. Then, in that directory "cat * > ../reassembled_file" would reassemble it.

(by the way, tar -L didn't obviously do what the poster wanted it to - maybe I'm missing something, but all I could get it to do was to prompt for me to insert new media into the device slot.)
posted by advil at 1:14 PM on October 12, 2005

Split&Concat
posted by ijoshua at 1:23 PM on October 12, 2005

Some cd burning apps will split the file across CD volumes for you. I recall Roxio (Easy) Media Creator doing so.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 4:39 PM on October 12, 2005

if they're both on the same network, set up a ftp client on one of them (thats what i do since xp < -> osx co-networking is a joke).
posted by softlord at 6:01 PM on October 13, 2005