Sharing a file with a link
A share link lets someone without a Filemote account download a file straight from your computer. It carries its own decryption key, so the relay in the middle stays as blind to the file as it is to everything else.
Create one
Select one or more items — files or folders — and press Share. Choose how long the link should live: 24 hours, 48 hours, 7 days, or a number of hours you type. The default is 24 hours.
You get a link shaped like this:
https://your-site/share/<token>#<key>
Copy the whole thing. Both halves matter, and the second one is why.
Sharing needs a verified e-mail address, and it is a paid-plan feature — the button carries a padlock otherwise. See plans and quotas.
Why the part after # matters
Everything after # in a URL is a fragment: browsers keep it locally and never send it
to the server. That is where the decryption key sits.
So the server can prove a link is valid and tell you which file it names, while being unable to read the file itself. Strip the fragment and the link still opens — and shows nothing usable.
Two consequences worth internalising:
- Anyone holding the full link can download the file. There is no second factor. Send it the way you would send a password.
- A link pasted into a chat is as good as the file. Chat search, link previews and screenshots all copy it along.
What the recipient sees
They open the link and get a page naming the file, its size, and a download button. No account, no sign-in.
The download streams from your computer, live. If your agent is not running when they click, the link cannot deliver anything — it is not a copy stored on the server. Leaving the machine on until the file has been collected is part of sharing it.
Take a link back
Open your profile and find the list of active links. Revoke kills one immediately: the token stops resolving, whether or not it has expired, and whether or not somebody already has the URL.
Links also die on their own when their expiry passes. Revoking is what you reach for when a link went somewhere you did not intend.
Revoking does not touch the file. It only withdraws the way in.
Limits
- A share obeys your plan's file-size limit, so an item over it cannot be shared at all; the dialog says so before creating the link.
- Folder sizes are measured before sharing, which is why the dialog pauses briefly on a large folder.
- Expiry is in hours, and a custom value that is not a number falls back to 24.
What is stored where
| Piece | Where it lives |
|---|---|
| The token, the path it names and its expiry | The server |
| The decryption key | Only in the link, only after the # |
| The file | Only on your computer |
That split is the whole design: losing the server database would leak which paths were shared, never their contents.
Updated 2026-08-06