Your WeTransfer link expired. Now what?
An expired WeTransfer link cannot be reopened — not by the recipient, and not by you. The file is deleted, and there is no button anywhere that brings it back. What you can do is get the file from wherever it still exists and send it again, and then change something so this does not keep happening.
Sorry. That is the actual answer and everything else on this page is downstream of it.
What to do right now
If you sent it: you still have the original. Upload it again and send a fresh link. Two minutes, mildly annoying.
If you received it and did not download in time: ask the sender. There is nothing you can do from your side — the link is dead, not hidden, and no browser trick or cached URL will help.
If the sender is unreachable and you need the file: check whether it was ever emailed to you as an attachment, whether a colleague downloaded it, or whether the file exists in a shared drive somewhere. Beyond that, the file is gone.
If you are the sender and no longer have the original: this is the bad case. Check backups, check the machine you uploaded from, check whether an editor or collaborator kept a copy. A transfer service is not an archive and was never meant to be one, which is the lesson rather than a consolation.
Why it cannot be recovered
The files are deleted, not archived. Storage costs money and holding files nobody has downloaded for longer than the plan promises would be both expensive and, for anything containing personal data, a liability the provider does not want.
That is the same reason "just extend it" is not offered after the fact: by the time you notice, there is nothing to extend.
For what it is worth, this is the correct design. A transfer link that lives forever is a credential sitting in an inbox — which is why every service expires them, including mine.
What WeTransfer's limits actually are
From WeTransfer's own plan-limits documentation, checked 31 July 2026: the free tier is 3 GB, counted across a rolling 30 days rather than per transfer, and it is ad-supported. Transfers that never expire are a top-tier feature.
So on a free account, expiry is not a setting you missed — it is the product.
Stopping it happening again
The pattern worth noticing: if you have re-uploaded the same files more than twice because a link died, the free tier is costing you more in time than a plan would cost in money. There are three ways out.
Pay for longer retention on whatever you already use. Simplest, no migration, no learning anything new. If WeTransfer works for you otherwise, this is the sensible answer and I am not going to talk you out of it.
Move to a service where deliveries persist by default. Different products draw the line differently. From each company's own documentation: Dropbox Transfer keeps files 30 days by default (31 July 2026); SwissTransfer deletes after 15 days with a 30-day extension offered by email on the twelfth day (1 August 2026); Filemail lists file availability as permanent on its Pro plan (1 August 2026). The full comparison covers the rest.
Yungle, which I build, works this way: on a paid plan, collections do not expire at all. Free transfers are 10 GB each, unlimited in number, no ads, and expire in 7 days — because a transfer link is a capability anyone holding it can use. Even on paid plans, transfers are capped at a year for that reason; it is collections that persist. Everything runs in Germany, on renewable power, with every file encrypted at rest under its own key.
Separate sending from delivering. This is the free option and it is mostly a habit change. Use a transfer link for one-off sends, and keep anything a client might come back to somewhere that is actually yours — a drive, a storage account, an archive. Then an expired link is a re-upload rather than a loss.
The rule that prevents the worst version
Never let a transfer service be the only copy of anything.
The recoverable version of this problem is annoying. The unrecoverable version — where the file expired and you no longer have the original — is a genuine disaster, and it happens most often to people who uploaded from a machine they have since wiped, or who treated a delivery link as their record of the job.
Whatever you use, keep your own copy until the work is unambiguously finished and paid for. That applies to every service on this page, mine included.
If you deliver work for a living
Two changes worth making once:
Tell clients how long the link lives, in the same message as the link. Most expiries happen because nobody said. "This link works until 15 August" prevents most of these emails.
Decide your retention deliberately rather than accepting a default. There are good reasons not to keep client files forever — both directions have costs — but that should be a decision you made, not one a free tier made for you.