Fixed: Multi-File Transfers Stopping After the First File

If you tried sending a handful of files at once and watched the transfer freeze right after the first one finished, sorry. That was a bug, and it’s fixed now.

What you’d have seen

The first file arrived perfectly. Then the progress bar sat at zero. After a minute or so the sender would say the connection had stalled and try to reconnect, which didn’t help, because the connection was never the problem.

What was actually going on

BoltShare saves files by streaming them straight into a browser download. That way a 40 GB file never has to fit in memory. For a batch, we started a new download for each file.

The first download was fine because it started when you clicked Accept. Browsers treat a click as proof that you asked for the download.

The second download started on its own a few seconds later, with no click behind it. Chrome has a long-standing rule for this: if a site tries to start several downloads automatically, it blocks them until you allow it. You might see a small notice in the address bar asking whether the site can “download multiple files”, but it’s easy to miss.

While the second download was blocked, nothing was reading the data we were writing to it. The receiver waited for space to free up, the sender waited for the receiver, and everything stopped.

The fix: one ZIP for the whole batch

When you receive more than one file, BoltShare now writes them all into a single ZIP file as they arrive. You get one download, started by your one Accept click, and it holds everything.

A few details we cared about:

• No re-compression. Files are stored as-is inside the ZIP. Photos and videos are already compressed, so squeezing them again would only burn CPU. Your files come out exactly as they went in.
• Big batches work. The ZIP uses the ZIP64 format when it needs to, so batches over 4 GB (or single files over 4 GB inside a batch) open properly in Windows, macOS and the usual unzip tools.
• Duplicate names don’t collide. Two files both called IMG_0001.jpg? The second becomes IMG_0001 (1).jpg instead of overwriting the first.
• Resume still works. If the connection drops halfway through file three, BoltShare picks up where it stopped, inside the same ZIP.

Single-file transfers haven’t changed. They still save directly as the original file.

One small side fix

The receiver used to show “Download complete” and the rating stars after the first file in a batch, which made it look like the transfer had finished when it hadn’t. That message now waits for the last file.

If you still hit problems with batches, please tell us which browser you’re on and roughly how many files you were sending. Bug reports like that are how this one got found.