Can you reactivate an expired WeTransfer link?

No. When a transfer expires the files are deleted from WeTransfer's servers, not hidden, so there is nothing left to switch back on. Support cannot restore them either. The only route is for the sender to upload the files again and send a new link.

How long do WeTransfer links last?

A few days on the free tier — currently three — and longer on paid plans, where the top tier lets you set a custom expiry. The short free window is the most common reason a delivery dies before the recipient gets to it, particularly across a weekend or a holiday.

How do I recover files from an expired WeTransfer?

From WeTransfer, you cannot. Ask the sender, who still has the originals. If you are the sender, check whether the recipient downloaded it before expiry and simply mislaid the files — it is worth asking before you re-upload twenty gigabytes.

How do I stop transfer links expiring too early?

Send with a tool that lets you choose the expiry, and pick something that survives a holiday — one to two weeks suits most client work. Then tell the recipient the date in the email itself, so the deadline is visible rather than buried in a notification they have already archived.

Does WeTransfer notify you before a link expires?

Notifications vary by plan and by whether the recipient opened anything, and in practice the first anyone hears about it is the expired page. That is exactly why the expiry date belongs in the body of your email rather than left to the service to announce.

WeTransfer Link Expired? Here's What to Do

An expired transfer cannot be reopened — the files are deleted. What to do right now, and how to stop the same thing happening on the next delivery.

Bad news first: an expired transfer is gone. The files were deleted from the server, not hidden behind the expired page, so there is nothing to reactivate and support cannot bring them back. That is the service working as designed — the automatic deletion is the product.

So here is what to actually do, depending on which end of it you are on.

If you were expecting the files

Ask the sender. They still have the originals on their machine. This is a two-minute inconvenience for them, not a disaster, and the sooner you ask the sooner it is fixed.

Check you did not already download it. Genuinely worth thirty seconds before you send that email. Search your downloads folder for a plausible filename, and check whether it was unzipped somewhere sensible. A surprising share of expired-link panics end here.

Ask for a longer window this time. “Could you send it with a longer expiry, I’m away until Thursday” is a normal thing to say, and it saves everyone repeating this next month.

If you were the sender

Do not re-upload immediately. First ask whether they downloaded it before it expired and simply lost track of the files. Re-uploading twenty gigabytes to solve a filing problem is a bad afternoon.

Then re-send with a longer expiry, and put the date in the email in words. Not “this link expires soon” — “this link works until Tuesday 24th”. The service’s own notification, if there is one, arrives in an inbox that has already archived the thread.

Then think about why it expired at all, because this happens on a schedule you can control.

Why this keeps happening

The free tier of most transfer services holds files for a few days. WeTransfer’s is currently three.

Three days is shorter than an ordinary working week. It does not survive:

A client who is out on Thursday and Friday.
A delivery sent on a Friday afternoon, which is when most deliveries get sent.
An approval that has to go via someone else’s line manager.
A recipient who reads the email on a phone, thinks “I’ll do that at my desk”, and does not.

None of those are unusual. They are the normal texture of client work, and a three-day window loses to all of them.

The cost lands on you rather than on the service: your file, your upload, your second email, and a small dent in how organised the whole thing looked.

What to change on the next delivery

Choose the expiry yourself. One to two weeks is the range that fits how client work actually happens. Long enough for a holiday, short enough that finished projects stop having live doors into them.

Say the date out loud. In the email, in words, alongside what the files are.

Know whether it was collected. A download receipt turns “has this expired for them?” into a fact you already have. It also ends the most pointless message in client services, which is “did you get that?”.

Be able to extend or replace it. If you can re-send or resend the same delivery without re-uploading, an expiry that was too short is a thirty-second fix rather than an evening.

Those four are the whole feature list of a grown-up delivery, and none of them are about file size — which is what almost every comparison of these tools argues about instead. The wider comparison is here, and WeTransfer’s own limits are broken down here.

Expiry is a feature, not a bug — when you choose it

Worth saying plainly, because everything above sounds like an argument against expiring links.

Files that never expire are their own problem. A download link handed to a client in 2023, still live, still pointing at the masters, long after that relationship ended and the stock licences lapsed. Nobody closes those doors manually, because closing them is nobody’s job.

The right answer is not permanent and it is not three days. It is an expiry you set on purpose, per delivery, based on what the delivery is.

That is how we built Transfers: you pick anywhere from one to fourteen days when you send, you get a receipt when someone collects, you can revoke the whole thing instantly if you sent the wrong version, and the download page carries your client’s branding rather than ours. It is coming soon on the Living Page Agency plans.

I’m Richard, and I build Living Page — document and file delivery for people who send client work for a living. See how Transfers works.