Symphony.

In my studio we often need to exchange large files with people outside of our network. At the moment we use FTP on our server but not many people understand how to use it.

I would like to develop a simple file exchange app with Symphony but there are a few technical aspects that I have doubts on. Maybe someone with more experience might help me:

• to be able to upload large files (like 2GB) it’s only a matter of changing PHP configuration or there are some other caveats?
• how could I secure the server for outside access?

Thanks a lot

I don't think HTTP is very well suited to large uploads.

I've had success with getting clients to use Dropbox, which is nice because if their internet connection drops it just carries on syncing again later.

We use dropbox here too! awesome service! or wetransfer.com for 1GB files or less if we need to.

sugarsync is another alternative to dropbox I think it also give slightly larger free space. the downside would be when you share too much you would need to either (a) have a paid repo for you to host more data then your limit. Pay attention when deleting stuff as it deletes on client side as well. Had the above problem when I was working on dropbox based files only for one of my mates to delete the stuff because she was running out of sharing space. (had to recover the data through some hidden files.)

Also worth keeping an eye on: http://www.syncany.org/

I hope to try it out next year.

Thanks for the quick reply.

There are two main reasons why we want to self host the app:

1. We prefer to have the files on our server so either the upload or download of the file will be through our network and much much faster.
2. A branded custom app looks way much cooler to clients :-)

Should clients be able to upload too?

Be warned that http is not the best protocol to handle uploads larger than what you usually see in webapps these days. You could potentially just increase php memory size but that would mean your server will allocate 2 GB of ram to handle the upload, which is quite scary (given you have that much memory available).

I dealt with a similar task in the past and we ended up using a crappy java client side app embedded in the browser that uploaded the file through ftp without the need to specify user/pass and explain clients in which folder put the file, but a very bad solution still (to me).

If you however, just need to serve big files to clients (that's why I am asking) it is certainly easier to provide a more encouraging answer :)