The best ways to transfer large files between your laptop and desktop: 3 options

If you do a lot of video and photo editing on location, you know what a hassle it is to move media files between your laptop and your desktop PC or Mac. 

So, what’s the best way to transfer those files from one device to another? As with just about every tech-related question ever, the correct answer is: “It depends.”

Also: How to transfer data from Android to an iPhone: 2 simple and fast ways

In general terms, you’ve got three options to choose from. Which one’s right for you? That depends on your hardware, your available networks, and your patience.

Option 1: Use an external storage device

Is this transfer the sort of thing you do only a few times a year? In that case, the simplest option might be to copy the files from the laptop to a portable storage device, then plug that drive into your desktop PC or Mac and use File Explorer (Windows) or Finder (Mac) to copy the files to your preferred folder.

The Elders of the Internet called this process sneakernet. It involved dealing with literal stacks of floppy disks — and it was mind-numbingly tedious.

Also: How I recovered ‘irreplaceable’ photos off an SD card for free

In the modern era, you can do pretty much the same thing, although you have much faster options, using portable storage devices that hold enough data to handle the entire transfer in a single swap. 

For huge video files, your best transfer vehicle is an external SSD or flash drive that uses the highest data transfer standard supported by both devices: Thunderbolt 3 or 4, or SuperSpeed+ USB 10Gbps (formerly known as USB 3.2 Gen 2 and before that as USB 3.1). 

Plug one of those drives into a USB Type-C port, and you’ll be astonished at how fast the bits fly from Point A to Point B. If that’s not an option, an external flash drive using USB 3.0 or later will probably be fast enough to get the job done.

Option 2: Use Wi-Fi or Bluetooth

What if you don’t have a portable drive handy, or you don’t want to go through the two-step hassle of copying and transferring? If both devices are running the same operating system, you can use wireless networks (Wi-Fi and Bluetooth) to transfer files.

Send the file from one machine, approve the request on the other, and your files begin transferring. You’ll get the best results if both the sending and receiving device are connected to the same Wi-Fi network and you’re signed in with the same Microsoft or Apple account on each device. The screenshot below shows Nearby Sharing in action on a Windows PC.

Option 3: Use the cloud

Both of the previous file copying options require some manual labor on your part. What’s more, there’s also built-in risk. If you make changes to a file on one device and forget to copy that file to the other, you could end up with edits that are out of sync. When that happens, you’ve got two different versions with no easy way to reconcile them.

Also: This feature lets you transfer folders between Android and Windows

The best way to avoid this possibility is to store those files using a cloud storage platform (OneDrive, Google Drive, Adobe Creative Cloud, Dropbox, etc.) and let a software agent on each device keep them in sync. If your work is mainly asynchronous — that is, if you do most of your edits on one machine and only need to transfer your files when everything’s complete — this option is ideal.