How it reaches your computers, what a scheduled task can do, what gets recorded, and how your files and passwords are kept safe.
LinkSpan is a website. There is nothing to install on the computer you are sitting at — you open a browser, sign in, and the drives of every machine running an agent appear alongside your Dropbox, Google Drive, S3, FTP and network shares. Same folders, same cut and paste, wherever the files actually live.
A production PC in another building, a render node, a NAS in a branch office. If it runs an agent, its folders open in your browser like any other location — from your desk, from home, or from a phone. The agent needs ordinary internet access, the same as a web browser: it makes one connection out to LinkSpan and keeps it open. Nothing has to connect back in, so there is no port to forward, no static IP and no VPN.
Click through folders, check a file is the one you meant, and preview images, PDFs and text right in the page. You decide inside the agent which folders LinkSpan may see; nothing outside them can be opened or transferred.
Cut, copy and paste between any two locations: one machine to another, a machine to Dropbox, Dropbox to S3. When a transfer turns out to be a routine one, save it as a task with filters and a time, and it runs on its own with nobody logged in.
A file finishes on one machine and is needed on another. A disk fills up and yesterday's output has to come off it. A folder on a NAS has to reach a client's Dropbox by the end of the day. None of it is difficult. All of it has to happen again tomorrow.
It depends on a person
Manual copying works exactly as well as one person's attention. A day off, a busy afternoon, a handover to someone new, or simply going home at six is enough to break it.
Nobody can prove it happened
When someone on your team says the file never arrived, there is no record — just an argument. LinkSpan keeps a per-file history: what moved, how big, how long, what failed.
A script is doing it today
Most teams have already solved this once, with a batch file and Windows Task Scheduler. It works until it doesn't, and then nobody knows for how long. LinkSpan is the same job with a screen to watch it on, a history and an alarm.
The generic tools don't fit
Consumer sync tools mirror one folder continuously. Real workflows need the newest file only, one file type only, only overnight, renamed on arrival, source deleted once it's safely there.
Setup takes a few minutes.
A small background service on each machine that holds files — Windows, macOS or Linux. It makes a single outbound connection to LinkSpan over HTTPS — the same kind a web browser makes — and keeps it open, so there are no inbound ports to open and no firewall rules to argue about. A machine has to be switched on and connected for its transfers to run.
Add the cloud accounts, servers and network shares you already use — and the local drives of remote machines, reached through the agents you installed in step one.
Open the file browser and click into any connected location, including the drives of the machines you just installed agents on. Cut, copy and paste between any two of them. Or build a task — a source, a destination, filters, and a schedule — and it runs on its own, overnight or at the top of the hour, with nobody logged in.
Most hosted transfer services pull your file up to their cloud and push it back down again. That costs you twice the time and puts a copy of your data somewhere you did not choose. Your agent talks straight to the destination, at whatever speed the two ends can manage.
Even a cloud-to-cloud job is routed through one of your own agents, not ours. Dropbox to Google Drive streams through a machine you control. What our servers hold is the schedule, your credentials, and the log of what happened.
One exception, stated plainly: when you click a file to preview it in the browser (image, PDF, text), that single file is fetched through the server and cached briefly so the page can display it. Nothing else is.
Open the drives of any agent machine in your browser and copy files with the cut, copy and paste commands you already know. Preview images, PDFs and text on the spot, or drag files straight from one location to another.
Machine to machine, machine to cloud, and cloud to cloud — including between two different providers.
Recurring runs and time windows in your organization's timezone, so a big overnight job never spills into the working day.
By extension, by filename prefix, or only the newest, the oldest, or the latest N files. Subfolders included — recreated at the far end or flattened into one.
Apply a naming pattern as files land, so the destination gets the names it expects instead of whatever produced the file.
Live progress while a job runs, and a per-file history afterwards — what moved, how big it was, how long it took, and what failed.
One email each morning summarising the night's runs, so you find out about a broken job before your customer does.
Multiple members, roles, and per-site and per-agent access, so an operator in one location only sees the machines that belong to them.
Source
Production PC
D:\Exports
Which files
*.pdf, newest only, subfolders included
When
Every night at 2am, your organization's timezone
What to do
Copy · Move · Delete — this one copies, and skips anything already there
Destination
Client Dropbox
And afterwards: live progress → a per-file history → the daily report email.
A file still being written — a long export, a device still writing — must not be transferred half-finished. LinkSpan watches the file size, waits, and looks again. If you have ever received half a file, this is the setting you wanted.
A Check button lists exactly which files a run would touch, and moves nothing. The cheapest possible way to discover a filter is wrong — before a Move or Delete task, where a too-wide filter costs you the originals.
On by default. Before sending anything, LinkSpan compares each file against the destination by name and size, and skips the ones already there — so only new or changed files move. That is what makes a task you run every ten minutes cost almost nothing.
A run that goes partial names exactly which files failed; re-running picks up only what's missing. A task that keeps failing shows in red, distinct from one that is merely idle.
You get logs at two levels: one per task run — when it went, how long it took, how much it moved, whether it worked — and one per file name, so you can look up a single file and say exactly when it moved and how big it was. Anything running right now sits at the top with live progress, and can be cancelled from there.
| File | Route | Size | Took | Finished | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DELIVERY_2608_FULL.zip | Production PC → Client Dropbox | 11.5 GB | 24m 11s | 02:24 | Success |
| DELIVERY_2608_INDEX.pdf | Production PC → Client Dropbox | 612 MB | 1m 48s | 02:26 | Success |
| EXPORT_0825_1900.dat | Site server → Archive NAS | 4.1 GB | 9m 02s | 01:09 | Partial |
| nightly-backup.tar | Office PC → S3 | 1.8 GB | 3m 27s | running | Running |
Success, partial, failed, queued, running, cancelled. A partial run names the files that failed, and re-running picks up only what's missing.
A daily report summarising every run, plus a dashboard of what's active, what's paused, what ran recently and what is scheduled next.
Cloud accounts connect with OAuth where the provider supports it, and can be disconnected at any time from the provider's own settings. An SMB share can be reached through a mapped drive or by pointing straight at it — which also reaches NAS boxes on the local network that the internet cannot see at all.
The passwords and keys for your storage are stored encrypted, and used for nothing but your own transfers and browsing your own files. When a transfer involves one of your machines, the credentials go to your agent and the connection is made from there.
The agent opens the connection and keeps it open. Nothing on your network has to be reachable from the internet — no port forwarding, no VPN, no static IP.
Inside the agent, on your own machine, you pick which folders LinkSpan may reach. Nothing outside those can be browsed or transferred, and every task stays inside its base path.
Idle timeout, optional approval for every new device, and a list of every signed-in device that you can revoke.
Because transfers go direct, your content is not sitting on our infrastructure to leak, subpoena or lose. The narrow exceptions — a preview or a download you ask for, or a transfer you explicitly route through us because no direct route exists — are held briefly and then deleted. What is kept, and for how long, is set out in the Terms & Privacy Policy.
The data meter counts bytes actually moved. The transfers meter counts jobs, not files — one task run is one, however many files it carried, and a run that finds nothing new to move costs nothing. Whichever meter fills first pauses further transfers until the period rolls over. Nothing is deleted.
LinkSpan is a transfer tool. It is not a backup product and it is not storage — it moves files between places you already have, and keeps the record of having done it.