If you’re like us, you share files from time to time with colleagues, friends, family and associates. Doing so in person isn’t hard at all, but doing a safe file share online can be tricky to some people. Of course, if you have a word document or one or two picture files, you can always fire such a file away as an email attachment, But what happens when that file is larger than 25MB? Most email clients do not allow you to attach files bigger than 10 or 20 megabytes. In such a case you may need to use a file sharing service to transfer the file.

If the file is extremely large, as in close to 1GB, you can use rapidshare.com. With www.rapidshare.com, you can upload a file of up to 1GB, and send the link to download the file within an email. While safe, this is not the safest way to share a file so we would not suggest you to use this method to share confidential files.

If what you are sharing is confidential, you can try www.box.com which offers government level encryption of data. www.box.com has many options but one of them allows you to upload files to a specific folder on your Box account and share the folder with multiple email addresses. This is a great way to share one or multiple files with a group of persons.
www.dropbox.com,www.skydrive.comand drive.google.comall offer cloud storage options that are very secure. However, if you are a complete security freak, you may like our next option.

If you have to share the secrets for the next big thing or some other top secret as the Pepsi, Coco Cola or KFC recipe, then you can encrypt the data and share the encrypted file with whoever you deem. In order to do this, you will need to use an encrypting program to do this. There are many programs that do this but our favorite is TruCrypt.
With TruCrypt, you can encrypt a file or a bunch of files with almost any level encryption you want and from there you can share the encrypted container with whomever you want. Should the encrypted container fall into the wrong hands, they would not be able to open the files because they need the password.

Be careful though because if you lose the password or the other person does not have it, there is no way for you to recover anything from the encrypted container. Best thing about TruCrypt is that it is 100% free and there is no limit to what you can encrypt.

Conclusion

When sharing files, always remember that there will always be a possibility of that information falling in the wrong hands so make sure that you count the possible risks before you share such a file online. If you are paranoid, do it in person or mail it. Also, remember that your files are only protected by the strength of your password. So use a strong password to secure your files.