As holiday travelers can attest, lugging heavy luggage and bags of gifts from point A to point B doesn't make your trip home any easier. Moving large electronic files is a similarly difficult chore. E-mail servers balk at large attachments, and besides, e-mail is inherently insecure. You don't want to send confidential files this way. You could burn your files to a CD-R, but the disc may be unreadable to its recipient. Plus, who wants to wait for snail mail, especially this time of year?

This is where your Web site comes in, stage left, to save the day. If you upload a file to your Web or FTP server, you and anyone you give the URL to can download it. And there is a way to do this with some degree of security. You may not even know it, but your Web host probably provides the ability to password-protect folders on its servers--in most cases for free.

A sense of security
There are so many hosts with so many different approaches to creating password-protected directories that it would be impossible to cover all of the methods here. Check out your own host for details, but for the many people with budget hosting that uses the off-the-shelf Unix-based WEBppliance package, the next paragraph will guide you through the proper steps. (The rest of you can just skip the next paragraph.)

First, you create a new directory with your Site Administrator software or FrontPage (if your host supports FrontPage extensions). In FrontPage's File Manager section, click Protect Directories and select the "Microsoft FrontPage extension permission management interface." If you don't use FrontPage, the Site Administrator software is the way to go. You must first create a group to contain the people who will have access to the directory, then create a new user to add to the group. In WEBppliance-speak, the new user falls under the HTAccess category. Once you've added all the new users to the group and assigned them passwords, you can create and add protection to a directory. In the shortcuts area of the Home page, click File Manager and select Protect Directories (HTAccess Configuration). You'll see a list of all of the folders on your site, and you can add protection at will.

Once your directory is password-protected, you can pass out the URLs, usernames, and passwords to the select people you want to grant access to the files on your site. All others will be barred from entry by an unforgiving authorization form. It's a simple trick but nonetheless effective. Assuming, that is, you don't forget to upload your files to the password-protected directory--and that's something that always seems to happen on exactly the wrong occasions.

Belt and suspenders
Just to be on the safe side, it helps to have a backup plan. If you need to share access to a series of works in progress on your hard drive, you could do a lot worse than using a product such as the Mirra M-80 Personal Server. This approximately $360 piece of hardware is primarily a home-network backup server that lets you share files (or not) with other people on your home network. It's not perfect, but it is absurdly easy to set up: you just plug it into your router, install a little software on your networked computers, and let it handle the rest. It backs up files as they change, so you don't have to be at all disciplined to maintain a regular backup.

But the 80GB Mirra M-80 and its more storage-heavy siblings, the M-120 and the M-250, also provide Web-based access to selected folders. You can designate any folder on the server as shared and assign access to people based on their e-mail address. Mirra's file sharing works much like the remote-access service GoToMyPC: anyone wanting to view files logs in through the company's Web site, then goes through your Internet access provider to the server on your network. There, through a secure connection, they can download files at will--but only from the Mirra Personal Server and only from folders you've set up as secure.

In my tests, the download rates from the Mirra server were not terribly fast, but then again, the upstream connection at my DSL provider isn't. That's what I get for concentrating on download speeds when I shopped for Internet access service. My next task will be hunting for broadband providers in my area again...

Found a good way to wrangle giant files? Share your wisdom in the TalkBack below.