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I am going to start an online business and would like to know what all the options are out there. I have found sites/services such as yousendit.com. What are other methods/sites that I should research?

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surely thats more related to general or market research and something that a competitor wont want to share too much about, if your startup idea is based around this then you really need to be looking into this yourself, with the amount of work ahead for any startup its a good idea to be prepared to get your own hands dirty with the sometimes headache inducing but necessary hours of searching yourself to see what your options are and whats standing in your way. – user14718 Mar 12 '12 at 14:00
xkdc covers some ways people are currently transferring files :] xkcd.com/949 - There are probably tons of file services you never have heard of; dropbox was the only one to make it seamless enough to make a huge impact and change the game. – Ryan Doom Mar 13 '12 at 2:36
Unfortunately, Dropbox & Co. do not work that way, as I just found out. You cannot enable your clients send you files without them getting paid accounts, if the files are big (several gigabytes in our case.) – Dmitry Leskov Mar 13 '12 at 5:03
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There are countless options. You will need to be much more specific. You could use something as simple as your own socket program with public key encryption, a simpler solution, such as ssh, or use a webservice, such as google docs. Are you simply looking for a command line tool, or something more complex, like a document sharing UI? – Phil Mar 13 '12 at 20:29
I think a document sharing UI. I was looking at sites like ShareFile, YouSendIt, etc. My clients would be needing to transmit financially sensitive data at times, so I want to ensure that I have a system setup that they can be confident is secure. – user16817 Mar 14 '12 at 22:49
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4 Answers

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Please be carefully when you use such services. For example Google Drive has some things in their terms which might sound as Google would own the files (please see yourself, i just heard that).

What I recently discovered and what looks pretty good is Spideroak:

https://spideroak.com/

SpiderOak is a zero-knowledge encrypted data backup, share, sync, access and storage service. Online and multi-platform with 2GB of storage free for life.

Besides that personally I like plain old E-Mail. It has every feature I need. For important documents I do sign and encrypt my E-Mail. Then it is guaranteed that nobody else does read it - even not any third party like a file transfer hoster. There are tons of instruction how to do that:

https://www.google.de/search?sugexp=chrome,mod=5&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=signing+and+encrypting+emails

There is good software available, like the classic PGP the open source variant GPG. Also there is S/MIME. CaCert does give you certificates for free. For all these services do plugins exist for Outlook and Thunderbird.

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Your question is somewhat vague. Are the files for processing (e.g. data file for online reporting system) or are we talking about adhok documents such as legal paperwork?

If the former, then go with the flow and get yourself an SSL certificate - banks use them, it has never been hacked. If latter, then there are various online services (such as dropbox/googlefiles/etc) or just use PGM or something similar and email encrypted files - even encrypted zips are very secure in real terms - sure thousands of computers can hack it in a day or so - is this likely to happen to you???

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I'm a lawyer and smaller companies typically send deal documents on Dropbox.

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Users can upload documents of up to 10 GB in size to Google Docs. But users also only have 1 GB of free space available. If you want more space, you have to buy it. But since many users have Google accounts, this could be a good option for your needs.

More info on space availability on Google Docs: https://support.google.com/docs/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=37603

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