Am I missing anything else obvious?

Maybe something like Dropbox?

tanstaafl.

Dropbox is obvious, but I think Cubby from LogMeIn was built with this situation in mind. I haven't used it very much, but I believe you can share any file/folder on your hard drive and generate a link for it.

The file that's outside of the main Cubby drive won't be sync'd to the cloud first. It just lives on your hard drive. Then, when someone outside your LAN requests the file, that's when it's transferred over the internet.

Don't quote me on that, though.

What do you mean by "he ties up his computer for hours at a time" ?

Edit: In this specific case, though, it's mainly upstream QoS that is needed, and that part is almost trivial to set up for the specific need in this case.

He uses fios and he reports a 2 GB transfer to europe can take a few hours

Six different offerings are available:[4]

3/1 – offered as an upgrade to FiOS for DSL customers.
15/5 – available as individual or bundle tier.
25/25 – available as individual or bundle tier.
35/35 – a bundled tier only.
50/25 – available as individual or bundle tier.
75/35 – available as individual or bundle tier.
150/65 – available individually and with bundles in some markets; it requires a GPON optical network terminal, which is only available in GPON deployed central offices.
300/65;[5] Standalone only; requires a GPON optical network terminal as well as a gigabit broadband home router.

Legacy speed tiers include: 5/2, 10/2, 15/2, 15/15, 20/5, 20/20, 25/15, 30/5, 30/15, and 35/20.

We're going to set him up with a basic machine in his house so he can dump files there at LAN speeds and let it deal with the time to move data at Internet speeds. Whether it's an ftp client pushing, an ftp server his clients pull, or something else entirely is still up in the air.

Just because it's "fios" doesn't mean "fast speeds".



What's the uplink speed on his fios plan?

If it's "25" or better, then a 2GB upload should take less than half an hour, unless fios also throttles, or if the other end is the bottleneck.

Empegger and BBS user Aleksander Milewski ("N6mod") used to work for a company that specializied in solving precisely this problem. I'm having a terrible time remembering the name of the company. Anyone else remember it so we can google it?

Basically they were trying to make a cost-effective and time-effective alternative to movie production companies and SFX houses having to ship hard disks full of video files to each other. (Because that was the way they were doing it at the time because it was faster than file transfers over the internet.)

It worked by having PCs at both ends of the link doing a continuous UDP stream that handled the data transfer communications in a round-robin fashion where the client and server didn't have to wait for a response before streaming the next set of packets. It could effectively saturate any connection up to its maximum available bandwidth, something that most standard file transfer protocols can't do due to the latencies involved in their handshaking protocols.