Dropbox announced today that it is making its new data transfer tool Dropbox Transfer available to all customers of the service.

The company launched Dropbox Transfer Beta earlier this year as a solution to send files, and just files, to others. The main idea behind Transfer is that it is designed as a straightforward way to send files to anyone, Dropbox customers and anyone else, without having to worry about access rights, links to the files so that edits are taking into consideration, or that the recipient is a Dropbox customer.

Transfer is our answer to a common problem: Sometimes you simply want to hand off files. No giving people edit access to your originals, no links that let people download updates you make later—just, “Here are your files!” While email might work for a JPEG or two, collections of large multimedia files easily go well beyond the typical 25 MB attachment limit. And Dropbox shared links are best for when recipients need access to always up-to-date files.

 

Transfer, though, lets you send up to 100 GB of files in just a few clicks. Just select files from your hard drive or Dropbox account to create your transfer. You can even password protect it and set an expiration date to encourage recipients to download the files. You'll get a link you can send to anyone—even if they aren't on Dropbox. After you send it, viewership stats let you see how many times the transfer's been accessed.

Transfer is designed to send files directly to recipients similar to how Firefox Send works only that the former requires a Dropbox account.

Select Transfer on the Dropbox website to get started. Dropbox displays information about quotas as the maximum file size depends on the account type. Free Dropbox users may use Transfer to send files with a maximum size of 100 Megabytes. Dropbox Plus and Business Standard customers may transfer files with a size of up to 2 Gigabytes, and Professional, Business Advanced, Enterprise, or Education customers files with a maximum size of 100 Gigabytes.

A click on "create transfer" starts the process.  Files can be added from the local computer system or from Dropbox. Local files don't count against the customers storage quota on Dropbox. Once you have added files or entire folders (with files), if you are a paying customer, you may click on the settings icon to change the expiration date of the transfer (up to 90 days) and set a password. Free users may not use these options which means that the files are not password protected and that the expiration is 7 days.

Dropbox creates the transfer afterwards and displays a link that points to the data. The link can be shared with others. Transfers can be managed on the Web; there you find information about the total number of views and downloads, and an option to delete the data right away.

paying customers may change the background and logo of the transfer interface that users who activate the Transfer link see.

How does it compare to Firefox Send?

Firefox Send allows anyone to send files with a total size of 1 Gigabyte and those with a free Firefox account files with a maximum size of 2.5 Gigabytes. The service supports passwords and limits may be set as well to restrict access by time or downloads.

Dropbox Transfer requires a Dropbox account and limits free users to a maximum file size of 100 Megabytes. One advantage, maybe the only one, that Transfer offers to free users is that users may pick files that are already stored by Dropbox; this reduces the time it takes to prepare downloads as no uploading takes place in that case.

Closing Words

Dropbox customers may find Transfer useful as it allows them to send files to non-Dropbox users easily nearly hassle-free. I cannot see many new customers signing up for Dropbox just to use Transfer, not with free options like Firefox Send available on the Internet.