Network-share files quickly and easily

Nick Peers reveals how to share files over your local network without getting bogged down in networking protocols.

- Nick Peers

QUICK TIP If you want to quickly share a file with a mobile device outside your network, Sharik will work with your phone’s mobile hotspot. Set up the hotspot, connect your other device to that network and you should be able to send and receive files between them.

Sharing files between two devices on the same network should be straightforward, right? However, anyone who’s wanted to quickly shunt a file to or from their mobile device, but struggled getting shared folders set up that all the machines on their network can see or access, might have something to say about that.

You could try setting up a pair of synced folders using a tool like the wonderful Syncthing, or make use of cloud storage such as Google Drive or Dropbox, but these all come with their own pitfalls. Synced folders can result in data loss if used incorrectly, while cloud storage has question marks over its security.

This is where a tool like Sharik (https://github.com/ marchellodev/sharik) comes in. It’s designed to make it easy to send files to any desktop or mobile device connected to your local network – whether wirelessly or via Ethernet cable – without the need for an internet connection. At the present time, there’s a Sharik app available for Linux, Windows, Android and iOS for sending files, but you can share files with other systems via their web browser, as you’ll see below.

Get Shariking

The quickest and easiest way to install Sharik is through snap – it’s integrated into the Software Store in Ubuntu 16.04 or later, or you can install it from the command line, as follows:

$ sudo snap install sharik-app