SendSpace Wizard

SendSpace Wizard is the desktop client for the SendSpace file-hosting service, and the first thing to know is that the name lies. There is no step-by-step wizard. What opens is a two-pane window that looks like an FTP client, your local folders on one side and your online account on the other, and files move between them by selection and a button. Anyone who has used FileZilla will feel at home in under a minute, which is the point.

The reason to bother with a client at all, rather than the upload box on the website, comes down to three things the browser cannot do. Uploads resume after a dropped connection instead of starting over, batches of files go up in one queue, and the finished links can be mailed to a list of addresses from an address book the application keeps for you.

For a teacher sending the week’s material to thirty students, those three cover the whole job.

Uploads that survive a bad connection

Queue a batch and SendSpace Wizard works through it, showing progress per file and for the whole set. If the line drops at 80 percent of a 2 GB archive, the upload picks up from where it stopped once the connection returns, which on a flaky hotel network is the difference between a delivery and an evening wasted.

The limits come from the account, not the client. A standard account accepts files up to 300 MB each and removes anything nobody has downloaded for 30 days, while the upgraded tiers lift the ceiling to 5 or 10 GB per file, keep files indefinitely and add password protection on links.

SendSpace Wizard inherits whichever of those applies to the signed-in account and will refuse a file over the limit before wasting the bandwidth.

Sending to a list, with an address book

Once a file is up, SendSpace Wizard can mail its link to one address or to many at once, and every address you type is remembered. The address book holds a name, an email and a short description per contact, so a recurring group such as a class or a client’s team is a few clicks rather than a paste job. The same file can go to several people, or different files to different people, in one operation.

This is the feature that separates the client from the web page most clearly, and it is also where the application shows its age. There are no groups, no import from a mail client and no templates for the message, so a large list is built one entry at a time.

Downloads, speed limits and the proxy

The right-hand pane is a live view of the online account, with folders, including the business folders a shared account uses, and the local pane refreshes itself when something changes on disk. Downloading from the account pulls several files at once through a built-in accelerator that opens parallel connections, which is faster than the single-stream download page the website serves. A speed limit setting in the options stops a large transfer from flattening the rest of the household’s connection, and proxy support covers offices that route traffic through one.

What the client cannot change is the service’s own rules. Standard accounts are capped at 1 GB of downloads a day and cannot resume a broken download, so the accelerator helps with throughput and does nothing about the daily ceiling.

For an account-centric desktop manager on a different service, a client built around one account’s folders does the same job with a friendlier face.

What is missing, and it is a lot

No encryption of any kind, so a confidential file should be put in a password-protected archive before it goes anywhere near the queue. No preview of what is in the account beyond names and sizes. No sync, no background tray mode that watches a folder, no drag and drop onto a tray icon. SendSpace Wizard is a transfer tool and nothing more, and the interface, functional as it is, has not changed in a long time and looks it.

Granted, none of those absences matter to the person it was built for. They matter the moment you expect it to behave like a cloud drive.

Conclusion

SendSpace Wizard suits anyone who delivers batches of files to a known list of people on a regular basis and wants the upload to survive a bad connection. For that routine it is quicker and more reliable than the website, and the address book earns its place after the second mailing.

If you want a cloud drive, encryption, or anything that runs quietly in the background, this is the wrong tool and the account limits will remind you of that daily. It moves files and mails links. Judge it on that.