On January 19, 2012, the US Justice Department shut down MegaUpload, one of the largest file-sharing sites on the Internet. Though commonly associated with piracy, many people used MegaUpload for perfectly legal reasons. Regardless of whether personal or pirated data was stored, users lost access to their files without notice. Although file-sharing sites have taken a tough blow, there are still a fair number of sites that still offer file-sharing services. Sites such as MegaUpload, FileSonic and Uploaded.to may not be around anymore, but there are still a number of alternatives that vow to keep their services. Some of the most popular alternatives include:

RapidShare
RapidShare is a well-known alternative to MegaUpload, with nearly identical services. In order to use RapidShare and upload files, users must create a login. With an account, users can take advantage of unlimited file size and storage, but files are removed after 30 days of inactivity. While most users take advantage of the free service, users are also able to purchase a premium subscription called “RapidPro”. With different payment models, RapidPro members are able to use unlimited storage and traffic, without the standard waiting time.

Mediafire
MediaFire is a free image and file hosting site, with a relatively friendly user interface. Free users are able to drag and drop files into the site without registration, with a maximum uploading or downloading size of 200 MB. MediaFire also features paid versions, starting at 9 dollars a month. With a subscription, users are able to use direct downloads, increased file sizes and a number of additional features.

HotFile
HotFile is another hosting website that allows users to upload and download files. Free users are able to upload a file size up to 400 MB, and must wait 30 minutes between downloading files. However, premium users are able to access unlimited, multiple downloading, with direct linking services.

WUpload
Similar to the above, WUpload is another hosting service that allows users to upload files up to 10 GB. One of the main characteristics of the premium service is speed: customers are able to access increased download and upload speeds, as well as unlimited storage and file size.

DropBox
DropBox is a cloud-based hosting service, which allows users to share files with each other. Unlike direct download sites, users must download a client in order to use DropBox. Free users are given an account to store up to 2GB of space , while subscription services allows customers to take advantage of additional storage space. DropBox also offers a service tailored for businesses, providing unlimited storage space at 795 a year for the first five users.

==== About the Author ====

Rachel Hyun Kim is a writer on topics ranging from payroll services to background checks. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including telemarketing for small business owners and entrepreneurs at Resource Nation.

As you probably know already, Megaupload, one of the most popular file sharing websites, was taken down by the FBI, which claimed that the website incentivized users to upload pirated, illegal content. While that may be true, there was a significant amount of collateral damage to innocent users who had uploaded their personal, legitimate data on Megaupload servers to store it and share it online. Despite being completely legal, those users have no access to their data.

However, there may still be hope. Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced that it has partnered with Carpathia Hosting, Megaupload’s hosting provider, to launch MegaRetrieval, a website which would allow Megaupload users to get their legit, non-infringing content back.

An EFF staff attorney stated:

“EFF is troubled that so many lawful users of Megaupload.com had their property taken from them without warning and that the government has taken no steps to help them. We think it’s important that these users have their voices heard as this process moves forward.”

The EFF hasn’t actually revealed the exact details about what it will do next, but for now, if you are one of the Megaupload users who lost their legit data stored on the website, you can send your contact information to megauploadmissing@eff.org.

Carpathia has officially stated that it doesn’t have access to any data for Megaupload customers, but it will try to help users retrieve their data.

Do note that the EFF doesn’t guarantee that you will get your data back. It is just trying to provide legal help to affected users.

The DoJ has announced that its searches on Carpathia and Cogent, Megaupload’s hosting providers, are now complete, and they may start deleting the hosted content from February 2.

However, on the EFF’s request, both the hosting companies have agreed not to delete the data without assessing the situation first.

The dramatic Megaupload crackdown has turned the online file sharing world upside down by shattering the illusion of invulnerability that many of these operators enjoyed. Earlier today, Uploaded.to shut out US users, while Filesonic pulled the plug globally. Since then, several more cyber lockers have followed suit.

Filesonic, which receives more than a billion page views every month, seems to be on the run. Not only is it restricting users from downloading files uploaded by others, there are also reports of large scale file deletion. The Twitter account of Filesonic, which is typically fairly chirpy, has also vanished off the face of the earth. Somewhat surprisingly, WUpload – which is Filesonic’s sister site, continues to function.

Fileserve, another popular file sharing service, has also capitulated. Going forward, you will only be able to download your own files from Fileserve. Other services operated by Fileserve – including Uploadstation, Filejungle, VideoBB and Videozer – also seem to be in shutdown mode. Affiliate program has been yanked, and user accounts and files are being deleted en masse. None of the files that I found through Google Search were downloadable.

Other services that Torrent Freak is reporting as down are Uploadbox, x7.to, and Filepost. 4shared has also terminated its affiliate program. However, unlike most of the other services, it has promised to pay out any dues within the next fifteen days.

Two industry stalwarts that have refused to budge are RapidShare and Mediafire. Both of them have decided to distance themselves from Megaupload, and are harping on the legitimacy of their business model. In fact, Mediafire even went a step further, and promised to shakeup the cloud storage industry with a major new release in the next quarter. I have included the responses from Rapidshare and Mediafire below.

Dear RapidShare fans,
You posted some comments on our wall today regarding the shutdown of Megaupload. There is no reason to be concerned. We distinguish ourselves from services like Megaupload in many major issues and we aren’t threatened in any way. One of the main differences between RapidShare and Megaupload is that we never wanted to escape from the legal access of any administration. RapidShare AG was founded in Switzerland, was always based at the address cited in the imprint and was always managed with an authentic name without any anonymous intermediary companies. The drastic measures against Megaupload were obviously seen as necessary by the FBI because the situation was different there.
We wish you a great time with RapidShare!

MediaFire’s premium services are based on a user’s ability to upload data and pay to distribute it. This storage and sharing model is similar to Akamai, Amazon S3, YouSendIt, etc. MediaFire has no caps or restrictions for downloading data and each upload is limited to a maximum size of 200MB for non-premium users.

Most importantly, people choose MediaFire because it offers high quality services that are simple to use and extremely powerful. We incorporate the latest HTML5 technologies, the most advanced user interfaces, and are constantly expanding our services with features requested by businesses and professionals. In Q2 2012, MediaFire will redefine how people access and manage their data and how they interact with the cloud by releasing long-in-development desktop and mobile applications that solve problems Microsoft, Dropbox, and Box fail to address.

A little more about MediaFire:

MediaFire was founded in 2006 and is based near Houston, Texas. MediaFire is used by people at 86% of Fortune 500 companies and is currently ranked in the top 100 websites globally by Amazon’s Alexa and Google/DoubleClick’s Ad Planner services.

Thanks again everyone, especially to our fans who we’ve heard loud and clear evangelizing the benefits of our service. It’s easy for us to get caught up in building our technology and services and we haven’t spent enough time espousing our own benefits and differentiators. The cloud is an incredibly convenient and powerful tool for many professionals, businesses and individuals. At MediaFire, we are committed to continuing to innovate on this technology and provide it to our users in new, simple, ethical and cost effective ways.

It looks like the Megaupload takedown is not just prompting rebuttal from sites like Uploaded.to, but also has put fear in the minds of other large File sharing websites.

After Uploaded.to blocked U.S. users, another large file sharing website called FileSonic has now stopped users from downloading files that other’s have uploaded.

When compared to Uploaded.to, FileSonic is a very large website with an Alexa global rank of 167 and a U.S. rank of 220. Compete data shows that FileSonic gets approximately 1.9 million visitors from the United States. The site now displays a message as shown below when you try to download a file from FileSonic.

All sharing functionality on FileSonic is now disabled. Our service can only be used to upload and retrieve files that you have uploaded personally.

If this file belongs to you, please login to download it directly from your file manager

It is not really clear as to whether FileSonic stopped file downloads due to fear of being targeted by the FBI and US Justice Department or whether they have already been targeted. However, it looks like that file sharing websites are starting to become cautious of what data they hold on their servers thanks to the U.S. Justice Department and FBI crackdown.

If you are affected by this, don’t forget to check out several alternatives to Megaupload to store files in the cloud and other ways to share files online. You can also check out services like Dropbox and SugarSync among others to easily sync and share your files online or take a look at several other services to backup and sync your files online.

This has been a very interesting last few days with the draconian piracy law of SOPA and PIPA being defeated in the U.S. Congress and Megaupload being shutdown by the U.S. Justice Department. In fact the Megaupload website was back online shortly on different servers as well.

In retaliation of the Megaupload shutdown, the famous group Anonymous also took down several websites in protest. However, it looks like the protest is now growing to another level.

According to reports from Torrent Freak, another file sharing website called Uploaded.to is now blocking users from U.S. and not allowing them to upload or download files from their service. This is definitely a big rebuttal from them and would likely make other services follow in their footsteps.

Currently, users who visit uploaded.to from United States are displayed a message similar to the one in the image above. It reads:

Not available

Our service is currently unavailable in your country. Sorry about that.

Uploaded.to has a traffic rank of 3075 in the United States according to Alexa and serves about 350K users from United States according to Compete. Though their stats are no where near what Megaupload had; which was the 13th most popular website in the world, it would definitely inconvenience U.S. users who have used it to store files on the website.

There is no official update from Uploaded.to about this blockage and whether it will remain permanent. In the meantime, if you have been affected by the Megaupload takedown or the Uploaded.to blockage, don’t forget to check out several alternatives to Megaupload to store files in the cloud and other ways to share files online.

The U.S. Anti-piracy law SOPA and PIPA may be off the table for now, however, it did deal a a major blow to the 13th most visited site on the internet – “Megaupload” in some way.

Yesterday, the Justice Department of US shutdown Megaupload; one of the most popular online file sharing website in the world. Along with the closure of the website, they also arrested 7 people in connection with piracy and other charges. The downside of this was that several users might have lost legitimate files hosted on their servers forever.

However, it looks like Megaupload is now making its way back on the internetz in another form. A forum post on a website (via Giga OM) says that Megaupload is now back online through a new domain name called megavideo.biz. However, the domain does not work fully, but they do have a working IP which does say that the site is back and they are working on it to get back to earlier levels soon.

The message reads:

WE DON’T HAVE ANY DOMAIN NAME FOR NOW

ONLY THIS IP ADDRESS (http://109.236.83.66) BEWARE TO THE PISHING SITES!

This is the NEW MEGAUPLOAD SITE! we are working to be back full again

Bookmark the site and share the new address in facebook and twitter!

A quick WhoIS of the IP address shows that the server is located in Amsterdam, Netherlands by the RIPE Network Coordination Center and not Sweden where File sharing is an official religion . Ironically, the Megaupload operation was a international co-operation between United States and several other countries which included Netherlands, so there is no guarantee that the above IP address may stay up for a long time.

It is not clear whether the site owners have access to the uploaded files when the Feds seized the Megaupload domains and servers. However, it could be that the site owners might have kept backups of the files in other locations as well.

It would be interesting to see, if the site really comes back into operation and how they would allow users to download files which they have already uploaded.  If you have been a Megaupload user, don’t forget to check out several alternatives to Megaupload to store files in the cloud and other ways to share files online.

Soon after the Internet community pinned down SOPA, the feds went after Megaupload and brought it down. Megaupload is one of the world’s most popular file-sharing websites. It has been charged with over $500 million in losses over piracy of music, movies and TV shows. This is one of the largest criminal copyright cases, and the Justice Department along with the FBI has been prompt in bringing it to a closure. Surprisingly, they did not need to use anything like SOPA in this case. This proves that there is enough law for taking down apparently rogue websites. SOPA is absolutely unnecessary and hence, unwelcome.

The founder of Megaupload Kim Dotcom, along with three others, was arrested at New Zealand, on request by US authorities. Megaupload was one of the 18 domains owned by Kim Dotcom and his company, and all of them were seized following raids on their three datacenters. However, this domain-seizure and arrest came as a surprise, because a few days ago, Kim made a bold statement in an interview with TorrentFreak.

Mega has nothing to fear. Our business is legitimate and protected by the DMCA and similar laws around the world. We work with the best lawyers and play by the rules. We take our legal obligations seriously. Mega’s war chest is full and we have strong supporters backing us.

The position on file-sharing websites has always been a controversial one in the anti-piracy debate. NY Times puts it into fine words saying,

Megaupload and similar sites, like Rapidshare and Mediafire, are often promoted as convenient ways to legitimately transfer large files; a recent promotional video had major stars like Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas singing Mega-upload’s praises. But they have become notorious inside media companies, which see the legitimate uses as a veil concealing extensive theft.

In the midst of all this ballyhoo, Anonymous rose in protest against the Megaupload shutdown, and brought down the Justice Department website for a brief period. They also attacked the MPAA, RIAA and Universal Music Group websites.

Do not forget to read some interesting traffic stats for Megaupload.

Free filesharing services like Rapidshare and MegaUpload are pretty popular these days, since more and more torrent services like Mininova have gone legit or been shut down. I’ve found that many of the shared files I find online are in the RAR format. People new to the file sharing sites might not know what a RAR file is or how to open it.   In case you didn’t know, RAR files are similar to ZIP files and are basically a collection of files and folders that are squeezed into a single file. Putting files into a RAR or ZIP format is like packing up a suit case before going on a vacation. It keeps a collection of files in a single place for easy transport.

If you’ve downloaded a RAR file and you don’t know how to open or unpack it, there are many programs that we’ve suggested for doing that. One good program for unpacking RAR files is called RarZilla Free Unrar. After you download and install it, here’s what it looks like when it first runs.

To unpack (or unRar) a RAR file, you can hit the Unrarbutton at the bottom and select the RAR file. However, this program also makes it easier to unrar files by simply double clicking on them.   Here’s what you’ll see after selecting a RAR file for unpacking.

I typically leave the settings as they are. When you hit the OK button, you’ll see the file being unpacked, as shown below.

Once it’s done, just look for a folder with the same name as the RAR file that you selected.

RarZilla also allows you to unpack password protected and multi-part RAR files. Naturally, you’ll have to know the password for a password protected RAR, and multi-part RARs must have all of the parts available and be named correctly in order to get them unpacked.

• Download RarZilla Free Unrar

Techie Buzz Verdict:

RarZilla is a great free option for unpacking RAR files. It’s easy to use, yet has plenty of options if you need them. There’s even a portable version available if you need to take it on the road. I will classify RarZilla Free Unrar as highly recommended.

Techie Buzz Rating: 4/5 (Excellent)

[Windows only] There is no dearth of online storage websites which allow you to upload files and share them with others. In addition to that, users also have an option to upload videos to sites like YouTube and Veoh.

However, while downloading those files users have to go through a barrage of wait times and ads, if you hate those, you can now download the files without having to wait and also batch download several files at once from multiple sites.

The Megaupload Downloader allows you to download files from popular sites like Megaupload, Rapidshare, Sendspace, Depositfiles, 4Shared, Mediafire, ZShare, Easy-share, Uploaded.to and more. In addition to that it also has support for video sites like YouTube and Veoh.

Techie Buzz Verdict

Overall Megaupload Downloader does the job very well, however, new users might get a bit confused with the interface because of the default use of the Italian language. You will have to change the language settings to English manually the first time.

The download interface is pretty neat with tooltips for the icons the app has. You can also easily add downloads and queue and pause them with the software. And to top it this is a Freeware and Open Source Software.

Overall it is a pretty good software if you are looking to download files from the sites listed above and more which have bells and whistles attached.

Rating: 2.5 / 5

Download Megaupload Downloader

The number of free hosting sites have grown significantly over the last few years. Zshare, MegaUpload, RapidShare and HotFiles are some of the popular ones that people use to host music, videos or other large files for free. If you are looking for a song, a video or simply a large file, you are bound to find it on one of these sites. However, going from one site to another searching on each site separately makes it painful.

DownloadMonster is a search engine that lets you search popular free hosting sites for media. They have indexed over 660,000 files and let you search a number of hosting sites including MegaUpload, RapidShare, DepositFiles and HotFile. With each search result, you can see the name of the host, the date file was uploaded, file type and file size. Clicking on any result will allow you to download the file to your local drive.

A colorful tag cloud and hot searches section tells you what files have been popular recently.