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Portal - a modern file transfer utility šŸŒŒāœØ

Zino Kader on March 08, 2023

Portal ...is a platform-agnostic command-line file transfer utility for sending files from any computer to another. The year is 2023 an...
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Kary J

Really cool.. but I wonder can a "direct transfer" happen outside local network? Or always through server if not in the same network?

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Zino Kader

In our testing, it's mostly in the same local network or within the same NAT at least. Since CG-NAT became a thing, direct connections with TCP has become somewhat impossible. We're looking into UDP hole punching for v2 of Portal, but I'm not very hopeful about it helping all too much. There's always the relay to fall back to, but direct connections are there as a best-effort approach!

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Andrew Reese

Reminds me of Magic Wormhole

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Zino Kader

It's very inspired by magic-wormhole! It's a different protocol and all, and has gotten a facelift, but there are other differences too.

We use parallell gzip compression by default, which takes at most a couple of seconds at the start of the transfer if you are sending gigabytes of data, but saves you minutes when sending. Plus, you're busy sending off the password during that time anyway! Then, we're overall sending stuff much faster. Not sure if that's due to inefficiencies in the magic-wormhole protocol, code, or if we just use a faster connection on our relay. We've also made it very straightforward to host your own relay, it's shipped in the client binary.

Side by side, Iā€™m sure you'll find more similarities and differences. I do think there's a place for both, though :)

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ganonbit profile image
Andrew Reese

Oh for sure, definitely see plenty of differences, just first thing I thought of when reading it! šŸ¤˜šŸ¼

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James Sinkala

Thought so too, only that I found MW to be slower when sending larger files. Hopefully this one is better at that.

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Zino Kader

Do try it out! We don't throttle transfers and have no special treatment for larger files. I bet you should be able to max out your residential internet upload speed :)

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Jorge Fuentes

filetransfer.io is way better than Google Drive

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Leober Ramos

Sure, but this is offline file transfer, instead that is online.

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Zino Kader

That is a good point!

To clarify: if you are hosting your own relay server with Portal, you can transfer files between computers within your local network without any internet access.

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llorx profile image
Jorge Fuentes • Edited

I said "better than Google Drive", not this tool. This post referenced one of the worst file transfer services and I said that there are better options. If you don't mind online but mind Google Drive being a hassle, then go filetransfer.io instead and you'll be good.

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Mark Clark

Tab-completion for passwords? What could possibly go wrong? ;^)