Geeky: Working with symbolic links
If you sell your files online and you want to provide a protected link, I found out, that very large files (above 500 MB in size) can cause a serious headache with a lot of downloaders.
Around 5-10% of all buyers of larger files complained in the last weeks, so I was playing around with the options we have here on tradebit. I figured the best approach would be a link to the large file, which is handled by the Apache webserver itself but still pretty secure in terms of public downloads.
Today I introduced the option for merchants with larger files to create so called “soft links” on their files. Basically the same technique, Windows uses on your desktop, if you create a link to a file on your desktop. Physically the file is on the hard drive only once, but the link “fetches” the data to its position, if accessed.
On Linux you create symbolic links with the command “ln -s /existing/file /new/file“.
But beware: if you go that way, you must introduce some infrastructure to remove outdated files automatically. The “cron” command comes in handy for that!
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