Changes to WeTransfer - December 2024

 

This one passed me by until it happened, but I am passing this information on to Aural Sculptor site visitors now. The good news is that the changes that were made effective on 16th December 2024 have no bearing on how you interact with the site. 

Each year for a number of years I pay a subscription fee (remember the collection plate posts that appear each September-ish!) in order that WeTransfer continue to host the many files that I have uploaded over time. Upon processing an upload associated with a post on 17th December I noticed that the option to remove an expiration date was no longer available. Users uploading files using the subscription-free version of WeTransfer have their files removed after 7 days whereas subscribers to the 'Premium' subscription package could remove the expiry data, meaning that files would be available for as long as the subscription was maintained or until the upload limit was reached. The latter was very unlikely to be an issue as I have used approvimately 660GB of a 5TB limit to date! I contacted the support centre about this and was informed that a 12 month maximum upload duration had been applied for reasons of enhanced security. 

So what does this all mean for the site?

All new uploads will be given the new maximum expiry date of 12 months from upload. In order not to lose them and leave the site with hundreds of dead links, I am noting upload dates for all files and I will endeavour to ensure that around the first anniversary of each new upload I will reupload and add a new link to the relevant post, thus extending the expiry for another year. This I can do repeatedly in order to keep links live indefinately (or until WeTransfer introduce further additional account restrictions).

For files allocated 'no expiration' i.e. uploads prior to 16th December 2024, I have been informed by WeTransfer, that the links will remain live until further notice, which I take to mean no changes for the foreseeable future, but who knows what may be decided along the road. I really hope that no similar surprises are in the pipeline as replacing all of the historic links would be a massive task indeed.

I hope that this a managable solution that will keep this material available.

To be fair to WeTransfer as a service provider, they have been pretty good (as one should expect with a €228/year subscription fee I guess). Having been burned in the early days of the site with megaupload and rapidshare, WeTransfer has been stable and reliable for many years now.