Question

So basically I need to upload large files, preferably up to 8GB.

I’m limited by these file upload limits:

<system.web>
    <!-- set to max value, max request size is 2GB, takes precedence over IIS -->
    <httpRuntime maxRequestLength="2097151" executionTimeout="3600"/>
    ...

<system.webServer>
    <security>
        <requestFiltering>
            <!-- set to max value, IIS max length of content is 4GB -->
            <requestLimits maxAllowedContentLength="4294967295"/>
        </requestFiltering>
    </security>
    ...

I’ve looked around a bit, and I’ve heard that the only way to get past the 2GB limit is to upload the file in segments, but I haven’t actually found any tools that can do this. Does anyone know of any?

Answer 1

WinRar, 7Zip or WinZip should be able to create compressed files broken up into pieces. If these files are then uploaded, you can put them back together by decompressing the entire archive. You can try using the 7-Zip SDK to compress / split these large files. Using compression you also decrease the upload time and the number of bytes sent.

There may be other similar tools for this, as the comments suggest.

Edit: just to make it clear – using any of these compression tools won’t obviously give you the ability to upload massive files in one go. They can be used to easily compress and split up large files into several smaller, more manageable pieces which can then be uploaded using the existing limits of the file upload control (or similar 3rd party controls). Using these tools would involve giving a utility to your users that helps with splitting up the file after which they can upload the pieces.

Here’s an article that has links to various commercial uploader tools that you may check out but I’m not familiar with them. It also links to Jeff Atwood’s blog entry that makes a case to use a desktop tool to do really large uploads.