I often do this and found that I often forget about it and it turns into a big mess of outdated file, so I periodically run a script in crontab that kills files older than a certain age. Works great for me.
I'd personally love a website that offered self-destructing url pointers or downloads. So, a url that redirects once to the target, that sort of thing.
You might not want to be too strict about it. I know I'll sometimes look at an attachment on the go, but not be able to download it until later when I'm at home.
I like in the little example animation, hello.txt is uploaded and a url is returned, but then a completely different url is used to get the hello.txt back.
Or at least add a delay at the end. It's not super hard to figure out what must be going on, but really the only thing you have time to see is the first line.
I use CloudApp for OS X for sharing files and it's pretty convenient. The best part is sharing screenshots with it. You take a screenshot, it is automatically uploaded to the cloud (no pun intended) and the link is copied to your Clipboard. You could not ask for anything simpler.
I'm still looking for an app which does just that, just with my own server via scp / sftp and not dropbox or a third party service. It's so convenient once you got used to it.
I installed that plugin on my boss's computer, totally forgot about it, and he was about to reach out to a bunch of executives on LinkedIn to ask them what was up with their profiles when I finally told him about it. Joke almost went a little bit too far :)
The one I posted is (mine and) amateur, don't use it.
It will probably be around for 5 years, but is not undergoing active development, and it was a side project I worked on for funsies (I may come back to it one day, and it's kind of a leave-it-be project, especially without 100s of users).
Please refer to the other ones for a serious (or at least more well thought out) solution.
I wish the URL could include a hash of the content so it could be used for verification for uploading and downloading the files. It could be handy for error checking and security checks.
A better approach than blanket allowing of hotlinking is to whitelist certain user agents (curl, wget) and only allow those to directly download the file, and to present landing pages detailing the file and its contents to everyone else. It's been on my list of things to implement in my own sharing site.
Right you are! We will implement a page in between depending on the referer. Direct download users won't have any issues, but to prevent abuse the page will be shown if from an other site.
Maybe I don't understand what this service actually does. When you take away the file expiration and the convenience of not having to manage your own infrastructure what is left? I've had this script in ~/bin for years.
It's quite heavyweight.. but I just installed https://owncloud.org/ on my own play VPS recently. Very happy with it so far. It's basically open source DropBox.
I've been wanting something like this for semi-private image shares as Imgur's URLs aren't very random; but Transfer has a similar security problem; it looks like the URLs need to be longer as a prerequisite to being un-crawlable. I hope you'll consider it.
Never expect things you upload to the internet to be private. There are so many vectors where this can go wrong. The host might list directory indexes, s3 buckets can be open, sites can be hacked, etc etc.
Op here. The urls are randomly generated combined with the chosen filename, I assume this should be safe enough. Links will expire in 2 weeks. Working on functionality where you can configure the lifetime. Eg, just 1 download or 2 days.
at least for common use cases like curl and wget you probably need a wrapper. I mean i love the idea of never leaving my cli, but... as developer and bash user im lazy... so please don't make type long curl commands. (Yeah I know I can add some aliases, but a wrapper could be handy). Anyway good job :)
