FAQ

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Sprend has a feedback forum but a regular FAQ is missing. Let me try and answer the most frequently asked questions right in this blog post.

I you can't find the answer to your question, please add a comment below. Or just phone me: Arne Evertsson, +46707145299.

1. Why does a transfer get interrupted?

Sprend uses built-in browser file transfer. It handles file uploads by "pretending" to request a web page while at the same time adding the file to the request. An http-request was never meant to be several megabytes heavy, and it lacks resumability.

It is the nature of Internet that interruptions are common. The reason for an interruption may lay in our server software, our local network, our internet connection, anywhere on the way to your ISP, in your wifi network, or even within your computer. The more time a transfer takes the higher the risk for interruptions.

There are more than one possible solution to this. Hopefully we will also implement one of them in the future.

2. How can I send multiple files?

With Sprend it is only possible to send one file at a time. When you need to send e.g. a folder with images, try this:

a. Find the folder on your computer.
b. Right-click onthe folder, select Send To / Compressed Folder or the equivalent for your operating system.
c. A zip fil is created.
d. Now just sprend the zip file!

3. How to add more recipients?


You can't, sorry. We'll add it, some day.


4. Why does the email never reach the recipient?

Even when you enter a correct email address, it might never reach the recipient. Reasons?

• The recipients inbox is full.
• The receiving mailserver filters the message and spam.
• + yet more different reasons.

How to solve? Try one of these:

• Use pincode. Tell the recipient the pincode via phone, text, email or your preferred way of communication. The file may then be downloaded by entering the pincode.
• When an uploads the completes, a link to the download page it displayed. Copy this link and email with your normal email client.
• If the file has already been uploaded and it's difficult or impossible to upload it again: Email support@sprend.com or phone me, Arne Evertsson, +467071452 99.

5. The upload seems to be going on forever

If the upload never ends, and there is no upload indication showing the progress, it means you need to close the browser window and try again. If that doesn't work shut down the browser completely and try again. Anyway, it's a known bug.


6. Hey, I got the wrong file! What's going on?!


There is a bug that we have not been able to localize and fix. Ever so seldomly the download link may take you to somebody else's file. This is a serious problem which we will deal with as soon as possible.

To be reasonably sure that your files are safe, please encrypt them before you sprend them. I know the WinZip has built-in encryption, but there is of course a lot of different encryption software on the market.

7. The file is gone even though seven days have not passed!?

This may be a glitch in our software. But more commonly, somebody already downloaded the file - perhaps the sender. As soon as a file has been downloaded it gets erased.

Sometimes our server counts a file as successfully downloaded even though it hasn't been. The reason may be firewalls that require user confirmation before allowing downloading. Basically this is a known problem that we wish to fix.

8. Does Sprend examine the contents of files?

We very seldomly examine the contents of files. When it happens, it's for a good reason and almost always with the sender's or recipient's explicit consent. So far I've done this less than once a year. It is however more common for us to read the filenames as part of normal service monitoring.

9. I'd like to be able to ...

You got a suggestions? Add it to sprend.uservoice.com. We may not add your feature any time soon, but at least we won't forget about it.

Sprend development moves slow because the service is free and we have other jobs.

10. Does Sprend work with my iPhone/Android/iPad ... ?


Safari for iOS doesn't support uploads. Downloads may work but I haven't really tested this. As Android phone are concerned I don't have a clue. I guess I need to write an app to make mobile sprending work.

FAQ (Swedish)

This post is also available in English.

Sprend har ett snabbforum för synpunkter, men det saknas en FAQ. Låt mig försöka besvara dom vanligaste frågorna från forumet i detta blogginlägg.

Saknar du ett svar, kommentera inlägget eller ring mig: Arne Evertsson, 0707 14 52 99

1. Varför avbryts en överföring?

Sprend använder sig av webbläsarens inbyggda filöverföring. Den funkar som så att webbläsaren "låtsas" efterfråga en webbsida men smugglar samtidigt med en fil i själva förfrågan (= http-request). En http-request är inte tänkt att vara flera megabytes stor, och saknar stöd för att återuppta en överföring som avbryts.

Internets natur är sådan att avbrott är vanliga. Problemet kan ligga i Sprends server, det lokala nätverket, internetuppkopplingen, någon stans på vägen till din bredbandsleverantör, ditt trådlösa nätverk, eller till och med i din dator. Ju längre tid överföringen pågår desto högre risk är det för avbrott.


Det finns mer eller mindre goda lösningar som vi förhoppningsvis kommer att implementera i Sprend i framtiden.

2. Hur skickar man en hel mapp med filer?

Med Sprend kan du bara skicka en fil i taget. Vill du skicka flera filer, tex en hel mapp med bilder, gör så här:

a. Leta upp mappen på din hårddisk.
b. Högerklicka på mappen, välj Send To / Compressed Folder eller motsvarande för ditt operativsystem.
c. Nu skapas en zippfil.
d. Sprenda zippfilen på vanligt vis.

3. Hur skickar jag till flera personer?

Tyvärr går inte det - en av våra värsta brister.

4. Varför kommer inte mailet fram?

Det händer att man matar in en helt riktig mailadress, sprendar en fil, men mailet når aldrig mottagaren. Det kan finnas flera anledningar.

• Mottagarens mailbox är full.
• Mottagarens mailserver anser att Sprend-mailet är spam och käkar upp det.
• + ytterligare olika anledningar.

Hur lösa? Prova ett av följande alternativ:

• Använd pinkod. Meddela mottagaren pinkoden via telefon, mess, mail eller hur du vill. Mottagaren kan därefter ladda ner filen endast med hjälp av koden.
• På bekräftelsesidan för en lyckad uppladdning finns en länk till nedladdningssidan. Kopiera länken och maila den med ditt vanliga mailprogram.
• Filen är redan uppladdad och det är svårt eller omöjligt att ladda upp den igen. Maila till support@sprend.com eller ring mig: Arne Evertsson, 0707 14 52 99.

5. Det står att uppladdning pågår och pågår och pågår...

Detta är en bugg i Sprend. Stäng webbläsarfönstret och prova från början. I värsta fall stäng ner webbläsaren också (alla öppna webbläsarfönster). Sen hoppas jag det funkar.


6. Jag fick fel fil! Vad är det som händer?!

Det finns en bugg i Sprend som vi inte lyckats lokalisera och fixa. Med ojämna mellanrum kan nedladdningslänken leda till någon annans fil. Detta är ett allvarligt problem som ligger högst upp  på att-göra-listan.

Om du vill känna dig förhållandevis säker på att dina filer inte kommer i orätta händer bör du först kryptera filen. Jag vet att WinZip innehåller en krypteringsfunktion, men det finns såklart många krypteringsprogram att välja bland.

7. Filen skulle ha lagrats t.o.m. 20YY-MM-DD men den är redan borta!?

Detta kan vara en bugg i vår programvara. Men det vanligaste är att någon provat att ladda ner filen - kanske till och med avsändaren. Filen raderas så fort den laddats ner en gång.

Ibland kan det hända att vår server anser filen komplett nedladdad, fast den inte är det. Det kan hända med brandväggar som kräver att bekräftelse på nedladdning. I dessa fall är ändå nedladdningen förbrukad. Detta är ett problem som vi bör lösa.

8. Tittar ni på Sprend på vad som skickas?

Vi undersöker nästan aldrig innehållet i filer som användare skickar. Det händer i så fall av speciella skäl och nästan alltid med avsändarens eller mottagarens uttryckliga tillåtelse. Detta händer kanske en gång om året. Filnamn ser vi däremot oftare som en del av övervakningen av tjänsten.

9. Jag saknar möjligheten att ...

Om du har ett förslag, lägg upp den på sprend.uservoice.com. Det går tyvärr med snigelfart att skapa nya funktioner, men vi glömmer inte bort dom.

Sprend utvecklas långsamt därför att den är en gratistjänst och vi måste tjäna brödfödan på annat sätt.

10. Funkar Sprend med min iPhone/Android/iPad/... ?

Safari för iOS har inte stöd för uppladdningar. Nedladdningar kan funka men jag har inte testat något vidare. Vad gäller Android-telefoner har jag ingen aning. Jag tror jag behöver skriva en app för att lösa detta.

Future of Sprend

I've had the goal of making the Sprend project more open and transparent. But writing blog posts takes a lot of effort so I've hesitated. Let this be a new start. With a little luck from now on I'll write more often, but perhaps my thoughts might not be as well pondered as those of Paul Graham.

Internally we've had discussions on our mailing list and irc channel about the next step. A new thing is our Facebook page thanks to Börre. I not particularly fond of the all-u-can-eat, we-are-the-internet kind of goal that Facebook has, and I canceled my account some time ago. But perhaps I can change my mind.

Now for the meat. This is my view of the future. The focus for Sprend (as soon as I've managed to amass enough cash to support myself for a few months) is to build a first commercial version. And no, we won't kill the free version in the process. 

The goal is to build a premium service with as little as possible of new functionality, with the simplest way of charging money (simplest to implement for us), and having a reasonable chance, in case of trouble, to bring back files of paying customers, with at most 2-3 hours downtime. The new functionality: multiple recipients and downloads, new field for sender's email address (= pretty much the top items of sprend.uservoice.com).

We will do this according to the KISS principle, as simple and as cheap as possible. At least we need to do the following:

• Design and implement the premium service.
• Solve problem 1: Our connection to the internet is down. How do we solve this for paying customers within 2-3 hours?
• Solve problem 2: Our server is down (for whatever hardware or software related reason). How do we solve this for paying customers with 2-3 hours?
• Solve problem 3: When the load of our free service affects the performance of the payed version, how do we make sure that the paying customers get to their files?
• Will we be ready for so much more support calls and emails?

I have most certainly left out a number of important issues. But this is a start. What do you think, team?

Facebook and things to come

Sprend now has a Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sprend/131233920261255

It's in norwegian, because Børre - our norwegian guy - created it.

But we're in the process of transforming it into english, because that's our default language when communicating with the world (we often use swedish and norwegian when appropriate though).

It has a nice visual design, so kudos to Børre's work.

Next year we have some improvements planned.

• A more modern user interface (the "look" of the website)
• The most requested features at http://sprend.uservoice.com
• Backend (server) upscaling, to increase speed, reliability and recovery of deleted files
• A pay-for premium version that will have more features, speed, reliability and security

More stats on our traffic

It's half a year since I published some numbers on the growing traffic of our server.

That growth has largely "flatlined" (levelled off) the last weeks, mainly because we reached the maximum capacity of our internet connection (during our peak hours of visitors) a long time ago.

But also the growing amount of disk IO and CPU & threads that Tomcat consumes does strain the server itself.

Anyway, here are the numbers as of 2010-10-10:

(The date 10/10/10 = 101010 = 42 in binary = The Ultimate Answer) :)

• Around 120-170 ongoing file transfers at peak hours
• Around 300,000 visitors (130,000 unique visitors) per month
• Around 260,000 successful file transfers per month
• Around 25 TiB (terabytes) of file transfers per month
• Around 800 GiB of user data, spread out on 8,000 files, is constantly in our storage
• The filetransfers consist of 58% uploads and 42% downloads (hey, 42, that's nice!)
• Around 17% of uploads and 8% of downloads fail (these are not included in the 260,000 figure)
• Around 88% of the visitors are from Nordic countries (82% from Sweden + 6% from the others)

Edit: See comment #4 of this post for updated statistics.

Regarding failed file transfers:

Sprend uses HTTP GET and POST, and we allow people to use any browser.

Neither of those are the best ways to transfer files in a reliable manner (but they are the quick & easy ways).

Click on the screenshot below and you'll see real statistics (and some of it is interesting stuff that I haven't talked about here):

(To note of the screenshot: it shows the average percentages over time, while I wrote about Sweden's current percentage. And Finland's 1% isn't visible in the screenshot.)

We must keep this eternal truth in mind though:

"There are lies, damn lies, statistics, benchmarks and delivery dates"

(To which I would add "religion, capitalists and Fox News")

Keeping the Sprend server happy

I've just blogged on my personal blog about something related to keeping the Sprend server healthy:

Automatically reconnecting ssh sessions at wakeup

Rock

I've been away for a month and Sprend has been rocking like a clock, humming like Volvo truck, and generally keeping users happy. That's good. That's nice. Mmmmm.