OurStick

A USB stick in a link.

Put folders on a stick in the OurStick app and send its link or QR code. The other person opens it in OurStick, picks what they want, and downloads it.

Straight from your computer to theirs, encrypted on your device. No accounts, no uploads to a cloud, no size limits. When you add files, the people who have your stick get them too.

Not yet: Macs with an Intel processor, and phones.

The installers are not signed yet. On Windows, your browser may warn that the file is not commonly downloaded (choose Keep), and its first start may say “Windows protected your PC”: choose More info, then Run anyway.

How it works

1. 1. Make a stick in the OurStick app

   A stick is a virtual USB stick: nothing to buy or plug in. Open OurStick, choose “New stick…”, and drop files or folders on it. It also shows up on your computer like a USB drive (a drive letter on Windows, a disk on a Mac), so you can copy things onto it as you would onto a real one.

2. 2. Send its link

   Press “Share” and copy the link, or show its QR code. Send it any way you like: email, a chat app, a text message. A link looks like this:

   https://ourstick.com/s/#ag7gk2…4qa.crkp9x…m4t

   • where OurStick finds your computer
   • the key that unlocks the stick

   Both come after “#”, which browsers never send to any website: not even this one sees whose stick it is.

3. 3. They choose what to get

   They open the link with OurStick (“I got a sharing link”), see what is on your stick, choose what they want and press “Get it”. The files come straight from your computer to theirs. When you add something to the stick, it comes to them too.

For example

• The holiday photos, 40 GB of them, to the whole family, without a cloud account or a size limit.
• A project folder for a colleague, kept up to date: every file you add or change reaches them.
• The footage of a film for the editor, straight from your disk to theirs, at the speed of your connection.

Good to know

• Your computer has to be on (and OurStick open) for others to get your stick. There is no copy anywhere else.
• Everything is encrypted on your computer before it leaves it (how). The key is only in the link, so anyone who has the link can read the stick: send it only to the people it is for.
• Directly when possible. When your computers can reach each other, the files go straight between them. When they cannot, the encrypted data passes through a public relay, more slowly.
• You see who has it. OurStick shows how far each computer that got your stick has come (“A Mac has all of it, up to date”), never its name unless its user writes one.
• To stop sharing, choose “Change the sharing link…”: the old link stops working for everyone, and you send the new one to whom you want. Or remove the stick.