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Share Links

A Share Link is a web-only feature that lets you grant access to specific files or folders to someone outside your site. With a Share Link, you decide whether visitors are allowed to download files, upload to a folder, or have full access (uploading, downloading, renaming, and deleting). Recipients follow the link to a web page where they only see and do what you've permitted.

While many business-critical file exchanges rely on systems automatically transferring files between other systems, sometimes you need to exchange files without a regular schedule. This is known as ad hoc sharing.

Onboarding and off-boarding users for one-time or short-term file exchange isn't always feasible because it requires too much time, and a limited number of staff have the necessary administration privileges.

Share Links provide human-centric, web-based, ad hoc methods of exchanging files with people who are not users in your account. In the world of MFT (Managed File Transfer) this capability is often referred to as Ad Hoc File Transfer.

Administrators enforce security requirements to protect your organization from shadow IT solutions and risky personal file sharing practices while still meeting your users' requirements for ease of use.

Share Links support a wide range of options to customize the behavior to meet your needs, whether you want to distribute files or receive them, either with an unknown public audience or only trusted contacts. Customers use Share Links to preview confidential images, send files too big for email, accept submissions from unknown contributors, run shared data rooms with external collaborators, co-author business documents, pair a download link with an Inbox for submissions, and solicit bids from a list of contractors. See Share Link Use Cases for examples of each.

Share Links are designed for ad hoc, human-centric file exchange, but they aren't the right fit for every situation. The sections below cover when to reach for an Inbox, Public Hosting, or a User Account instead.

The most important difference between Share Links and Inboxes is that Inboxes are permanent, and never expire. Share Links are designed for temporary use. If you want to make a public upload webpage available for a long period of time use an Inbox for that upload instead.

Inboxes are intended only for collecting files, but Share Links allow access to multiple folders and files, allowing visitors to download or upload or both.

Site Administrators and users with admin rights for a folder create and manage Inboxes. If you want other users to create their own upload links, use Share Links. To ensure that uploads from web visitors only occur in specific folders in your site, use Inboxes to define where those uploads will go.

Inboxes allow people to submit files through email. Share Links only work with web submissions. If you'd like to enable email uploads, use an Inbox configured to accept emails.

Share Links allow you to create a listing of files and folders for public access, especially if you embed it within another site and disable password protection. However, such a link still requires a human to access the page and download files. If your aim is to allow remote scripts to access your files via the web, use Public Hosting instead of Share Links.

Share Links support full access for web visitors, providing an experience much like the Files section of the web interface, but with less work than onboarding your contacts as users of your Files.com site. However, certain features of user accounts are not supported by Share Links, and creating user accounts makes more sense for certain cases.

Users receive automatic email notifications. If you are sharing files with an external party on a regular, recurring basis, it's often desirable to automatically send notifications when there are new files for them to download. Email notifications are only sent to users and user groups; to take advantage of automated notifications, your counterparty must have a user account for your site.

User accounts support advanced authentication and two-factor authentication methods, while Share Links only support password authentication. If your organization requires two-factor authentication for all file exchange, you'll need to create Users rather than using Share Links.

User accounts connect in multiple ways (web, API, SDK, CLI, protocol-based file transfer, desktop apps, and mobile apps), while Share Links only allow file transfers through a web page. If your contacts need any other supported methods, create a User account for them.