34 representatives of 20 organizations (including 17 NRENs) from 17 countries participated in the annual FileSender meeting at TNC26 in Helsinki, Finland, held on June 9, 2026. Here, FileSender community enthusiasts – service providers, users and developers – met to exchange their experiences, share expectations and discuss priorities for the future. This year’s meeting catalysed an active dialogue, driving a harvest of valuable insights and productive discussions, and set an inspiring course for continued collaboration.
FileSender aims to be a widely deployed service enabling anyone to easily and securely transfer files of any size from any person or machine to any other person or machine through a trusted intermediary. FileSender explicitly targets mass usage and is built to service the 99% of users who would rather spend their time on other things than figuring out how to perform large file transfers.
The FileSender open source project has been jointly developed and improved collaboratively since its inception in 2009. It is a truly international joint effort, achieved through the persistent hard work and dedication of all involved. FileSender grows stronger with the contributions of developers, testers, writers and many other supporters. The software collaboration underpins a global deployment of R&E FileSender services, with the use in other sectors increasing.
Jan Meijer of Sikt, the Norwegian NREN, and Chair of the FileSender Board, presented the 2026 update on deployments in the national R&E space. In addition to the steady increase in national-level installations – 54 countries worldwide – FileSender is now being adopted by non-NREN organizations and communities beyond R&E. He encouraged the audience to share their FileSender statistics to highlight the aggregate pan-European and global value created together in R&E, supporting the statement: for X people in Y countries, transferring files up to 1 TB is no longer an issue.
An overview of the FileSender development collaboration (2.x and 3.x releases, online infoshares, news articles), along with the current status of finances and contributor contracts, was provided.
We are grateful to AARNet (Australia), ACOnet (Austria), Arnes (Slovenia), Asiera (Ireland), Belnet (Belgium), CSC (Finland), DeiC (Denmark), GARR (Italy), NII (Japan), REANNZ (New Zealand), Switch (Switzerland), and to the German Cancer Research Center – 12 organisations in total – supporting FileSender financially with active contribution agreements:
Organisation
AARNet
ACOnet
Arnes
Asiera
Belnet
CSC
DeiC
DKFZ (German Cancer Research Center)
GARR
NII
REANNZ
Switch
Country
Australia
Austria
Slovenia
Ireland
Belgium
Finland
Denmark
Germany
Italy
Japan
New Zealand
Switzerland
World region
Asia-Pacific
Europe
Europe
Europe
Europe
Europe
Europe
Europe
Europe
Asia-Pacific
Asia-Pacific
Europe
Level
Silver
Bronze
Bronze
Silver
Silver
Bronze
Bronze
Bronze
Bronze
Bronze
Bronze
Silver
Annual amount
€10,000
€5,000
€5,000
€10,000
€10,000
€5,000
€5,000
€5,000
€5,000
€5,000
€5,000
€10,000
Agreement signed
20 Feb 2023
27 Mar 2023
19 Aug 2024
2 May 2024
18 Jan 2023
19 Dec 2023
11 Sep 2023
30 Sep 2024
12 Dec 2022
6 Nov 2025
22 Aug 2024
20 Oct 2022
Besides these, RNP (Brazil) provides a substantial in-kind contribution, having taken responsibility for implementing and maintaining the new user interface in version 3.x. SURF (the Netherlands) assists FileSender considerably with both financial backing and in-kind resources. All current Gold- and Silver-level contributors – AARNet, Asiera, Belnet, RNP, SURF and Switch – benefit from their logos appearing in the FileSender banner as of version 3.0.
The strategic roadmap outlines incremental evolution of FileSender, focusing on performance and stability, and improvements on download functionality. End-of-support for FileSender version 2.x has been announced, with no more feature improvements and security updates after January 2027. All current FileSender deployments are urged to upgrade their service from version 2.x to version 3.x by following the upgrading instructions and new sites to install FileSender version 3.x to ensure continuous security and optimal performance.
Boris Dintrans of RENATER, the French NREN, spoke about their experience running FileSender on the current S3 storage implementation and noted specific performance issues. He proposed a collaborative workshop dedicated to reimplementation of the S3 storage connector with a focus on sustainability and scalability, inviting the community to co-design a more robust solution. RENATER is willing to implement a renewed object storage backend as an in-kind contribution.
Guido Aben of SUNET, the Swedish NREN, and member of the FileSender Board, introduced the FileSender federation Proof of Concept (PoC) – a project related to data movement fabric for the Puhuri project. This initiative makes FileSender much more relevant in the research infrastructure context, particularly in high-performance computing environments. Building upon NII‘s contribution in named endpoints and FileSender-to-FileSender high-speed transfers, this PoC paves the way for a multi-node FileSender federation.
During this meeting, different ways to improve security hardening were discussed. A recent PoC explored reimplementation of FileSender in Go. Rogier Spoor of SURF, the Dutch NREN, and member of the FileSender Board, emphasized the importance of tackling current security challenges: popular open-source projects now face intense pressure from a growing number of valid CVE reports, often discovered with AI tools, requiring significant resources for vulnerability fixing. He stressed the necessity of code restructuring to make it easier to maintain, deploy, and secure, and advocated for a systematic approach.
Several participants expressed a wish to make installation and updates easier and agreed to coordinate on a proposal for containerised deployments.
The encouraging progress of FileSender, as an open source project, happens when individuals and organisations are willing to collaborate and to contribute their time and resources. Any FileSender user can join us and get involved in the FileSender development effort – we would love to see your participation and help! All contributions are always warmly welcomed, big and small. If you think the FileSender software is valuable and you want to support its continued development financially or in-kind, please let us know by sending an email directly to the FileSender Board.
