Taildrop: Simple Worldwide File Transfers via Tailscale - No Cloud Required!

0:00 hey everybody it's lony and last year we did a video about a great personal VPN called tail scale for private users it is completely free and it allows you to connect to all of your devices anywhere in the world with a little private IP address just for you and it works without having to open up any ports on the firewall it is a remarkable software product it is very secure I've been using it now ever since I made that original video and I find New Uses for it every day including this really cool feature called tail drop check this out I've got an Android phone with a picture and an iPhone and if you have an Apple phone you know how easy airdrop can be well now with tail scale I can go ahead here and share this photo with my iPhone with just a couple of clicks here and

0:46 now that I've got the image here I can just jump over and look at it look at that Isn't that cool just one tap and I can make this happen and when I was in Las Vegas for CES I was sending files back here to Connecticut from Las Vegas Nevada using the very same process this will work no matter where you are in the world so why don't we explore this feature and see how it works it is super easy to get it up and running but I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure this is not a paid sponsorship tail scale is not reviewing or approving this before it gets uploaded and I am using their free tier which is available to everybody including you if you wanted to give it a shot and all opinions of course are my own so let's get into it now and explore this tail drop feature now you'll find more information about this feature on

1:32 the tail drop support page that I'll put in the video description link right now this is an alpha feature that has to be enabled but to enable it all you got to do is go into your uh admin panel here the web based one and scroll down to where you see send files and just enable it and once you enable it on your control panel it will activate across all of your different clients now on most devices what will happen is after the file is sent you will find it in the download folder of your device that includes Android Windows and Mac on the iPhone it's a little bit different you have to go into the files app and as you saw when I got the uh image a second ago it did prompt me with a notification that I tapped on and it brought me right

2:18 to this spot but if you happen to want to come back in later uh what you need to do is load up the Apple files app that's a built-in system app that allows you to browse the file structure on your phone and what you want to look for is the on my iPhone section and go over to tail scale and that is where you will find the image or whatever else you sent to yourself and you can send yourself anything PDF files video files it doesn't really matter what you send whatever you decide to send from one device to the other will arrive and of course your bandwidth will determine how quickly that file gets there in my case when I was in Las Vegas I had to upload my CES dispatch videos to two different places and the bandwidth was really strained in Vegas so what I did before I went to bed at night was I loaded the

3:03 file onto my phone and then tail dropped it to my Mac that is sitting here on my desk and then I use tail scale to remote desktop into that Mac and then upload to float plane and YouTube and it was just as simple as that but of course you're always at the mercy of whatever bandwidth you're having to deal with one other note before I show you some additional use cases is that right now the mac and iOS versions do not allow for file resuming and you do have to keep the tail Scale app active as the foreground application while you're sending and if anything interrupts the transfer on a Mac or iPhone you have to start all over again although the other platforms are a little more forgiving allowing you to resume file transfers and that of course will improve as this

3:49 feature continues to develop let's take a look at a few use cases now so why don't we start off here with Windows and I've got Windows 11 running here on my ham radio computer and I've got some packet that it captured uh from the aprs network and what I'm going to do here is right click on the file go to show more options and then you'll see an option on here when you have this feature enabled called send with tail scale so when I click on this what I'll get here is a dialogue of all of the devices on my tail scale Network that are currently active and so right now I'm using my M2 MacBook Air here so I'm just going to click on that and as you can see here it just sent the file to my Mac and if if I jump over to the Mac uh you can see now that that file is right here and then on

4:34 the Mac what I can do is right click on it and go over to share and just like before we have a tail scale option on the Mac side I'm going to click on that and the same function will happen here I will get a list of available computers that are open and ready for my device and I think what I'm going to do in this case is send it over to my uh Android phone so I'm going to click on uh send here next to the Android phone and that will send it along and now if we jump over to my Android phone and go into its files dialogue and we jump over to the download folder here you can see now we've got that text file that just transferred over it's that simple it's that easy there's no approval on the other side because everybody's logged in and authenticated on your tailscale

5:19 network it will just send these files and drop them off in the download directory for each now if you have a sonology or qap Nas device they have instructions on the support page about how to get this feature configured there's a little bit of upfront work for these two devices but after that it will work just like you saw here it'll drop things off into a folder that you specify and then you can move files from there and this is one of those things that I've had for a while and I never really used it until I had a need and now I'm using it all the time it is so quick to just move files from one device to the other and of course once you get it on device you can hit the share button on your mobile phone and drop it into your photo album or whatever other mobile app you want to use the file with so very simple very easy to use if you haven't already checked out my video

6:06 about tail scale definitely check it out because for me it's been a life Cher and it's also made my network a lot more secure because now my entire network is locked down there's no outside ports opened up on my router yet I can get access to all sorts of stuff that I'm hosting on my individual computers but also in Docker containers on my network attached storage device really cool stuff check it out if you haven't already and until next time this is lon cbin thanks for watching