What a drive actually costs
Shipping a drive feels free because the bandwidth is. The rest is not: the drive itself, the courier, the customs form when it crosses a border, the day or two in transit, the person who has to copy the data on at one end and off at the other, and the occasional drive that arrives late, damaged or not at all. A drive that lands corrupt is discovered only when someone tries to read it, which is usually the day the data was needed.
Studios ship drives because uploading was slower. Over TCP, an ordinary upload of 2 TB to another continent can take days, and a dropped connection often means starting again. That comparison changes when a transfer holds line rate.
Move it over the wire, at the speed of the wire
Boita moves data with an accelerated transfer engine over UDP with its own rate control. The transfer climbs to your line rate and holds it whether the far end is across town or across an ocean. Big jobs run as parallel sessions sized to your plan, so a single delivery can fill an office connection. Try the speed calculator on the home page with your own line and destination; it states the model it uses.
In the desktop app, a dropped link, a closed laptop or a restart picks up where it stopped by itself, and completed files are never re-sent. Start a 5 TB job on Friday evening from the desktop app for macOS, Windows or Linux; it runs from the menu bar or tray with the window closed, and nobody has to sign for it.
Know it landed, know it is intact
The server records a checksum for every file at transfer time and shows it in the file details, so the receiving side can confirm the copy against the original before anyone does a day’s work on it. Send the result as a share link with an expiry, an optional password and a download limit; the recipient opens a page and downloads without an account, and the sender dashboard shows when they did. For data coming back the other way, an upload portal gives the sender a link into a folder you choose.
For a recurring delivery, a watch folder in the desktop app turns a local folder into a standing instruction: whatever lands here goes there, sent once it has stopped changing, restart-safe. Allowed hours per watch folder and a workspace bandwidth window, enforced by the transfer server, let the copy run overnight without touching the day’s work.
When a drive still makes sense
If your connection is very slow relative to the data, a drive can still win on raw hours: run the calculator and compare. For everything else, the wire is faster, cheaper and verifiable. Plans are flat monthly amounts sized by storage, retention and seats, with no per-GB fees and no charge for downloads; a Pro workspace includes 1 TB of storage and Scale 10 TB, with Enterprise custom above that. Scale and above can also move finished folders to an archive tier with a manifest and restore them on demand.
- Line-rate transfers over any distance; parallel sessions per plan
- Automatic resume in the desktop app; nothing re-sent
- Checksum on every file, visible before the data is used
- Share links and upload portals with no accounts for the other side
- Flat plans, no per-GB fees; India billing in INR with GST