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Receive what someone is sending you with a room code or a share link, into a folder you choose on this PC. This page is for the person on the receiving end of a transfer, whichever Floe app the sender uses. Needs: Floe Desktop on Windows, and a code or link from a sender whose Floe is still open. See Installation.

The short version

Paste the code or link into Receive > Code, and click Receive. Files go to your Downloads folder unless you choose another one, and nothing is ever overwritten. When the card reads Saved to, the files are complete.
The Floe Desktop Receive card on Code, with the Code or link field, the Save to field and Browse, and the Receive button.

The Receive tab, on Code

1

Open the Receive tab and choose Code

Code sits next to Request link under the tabs. While you have a request link open, Receive opens on Request link, so click Code.
2

Paste the code or link

Put what the sender gave you into Code or link. See Enter a code or link.
3

Choose where the files go

Leave Save to blank for your Downloads folder, or pick another one. See Choose where files land.
4

Click Receive

Floe connects and saves the files as they arrive. See The transfer.
To get files from someone who has not started a transfer, make a request link and send it to them instead.
The Code or link field accepts any of these:
  • A room code, three words such as olive-tiger-castle. Capital letters do not matter.
  • A share link, for example https://floe.one/#k=<link key>&room=<room id>.
  • A link from an older Floe release, with #room= or ?room= and no link key.
So whatever the sender copied, pasting it works, including a link that lost its https:// or arrived wrapped in angle brackets or quotes. Press Enter in the field instead of clicking if you prefer. A room code works for one receiver, and for 10 minutes at most. See How a transfer works. In Floe Desktop 1.1 and later, a link cut short partway through its link key or its room id reads Error: That link is incomplete. Copy the whole link again, including everything after the #. Floe Desktop 1.0.x reads a link cut in its link key as “That code wasn’t recognized”. Floe Desktop 1.1 and later checks a link that holds a link key. Before it saves anything, the sender has to prove it holds the same link key. A sender that cannot prove it gets Error: Couldn't confirm who sent this link. Nothing was received, and a sender that connects and says nothing gets Error: The sender never started sending after 30 seconds. Floe Desktop 1.0.x reads the room id and ignores the link key. A room code or an older link holds no link key, so it has no check, and nothing on screen tells them apart. See What the link key checks. A share link names the server that holds its room, and Floe checks it against the server it is set to use before it connects. A code carries no server, so it is never refused this way: See Server for where that address is set. A request link, one with /r/ in it, is the exception: it is for sending files to someone, not for receiving. Floe says “Request links open in a web browser” and offers Open in browser instead, also for a link pasted without https:// or inside quotes or angle brackets.

Choose where files land

Save to is where everything arrives. Leave it blank and Floe uses your Downloads folder, or your home folder if you do not have one. Click Browse to pick another one, or type a path directly. Floe creates the folder if it does not exist. A path you type is read like this:
  • A relative path such as Pictures\Drops is read from your home folder, so that one is the Drops folder in your Pictures folder.
  • Variables such as %USERPROFILE% and a leading ~ work.
  • The quotes that File Explorer’s Copy as path adds are dropped.
  • A path written without its drive is read the way earlier versions of Floe read it: \Floe on the current drive, usually C:, and D:Floe on D:, usually at its top level.
A folder Floe cannot create stops the receive before it connects with Error: Can't write to the save folder. Whatever you choose here is remembered for next time. It is the same setting as Save received files to in Settings, so you can set it in either place.

The transfer

Click Receive. Floe joins the room, connects to the sender, and starts writing files straight to disk. For a code or link there is nothing to accept: unlike floe receive in the CLI, Floe’s command-line tool, the desktop app starts as soon as it connects. Files that come through your own request link are different. Each drop waits for you to click Accept, unless you made the link with Auto-accept on. The status line under the card reads Connecting... after you click. As soon as the sender announces the transfer, and before the first byte lands, the card shows what is incoming: Incoming: report.pdf · 4.2 MB for one file, or Incoming: 12 files · 1.3 GB for several. The badge at the top right shows DIRECT or RELAY once the route is known (a RELAY transfer goes through Floe’s encrypted relay, a server that passes the data along). A progress bar shows the current file with speed and time remaining. Cancel stops it. Once the sender is there, Floe asks Windows not to sleep until the transfer ends. The screen can still turn off. Closing the window mid-receive asks first, in a dialog titled Close Floe? that reads “Closing now stops the transfer before the files finish”. Keep open (or Esc) goes back, and Close stops the transfer and quits Floe.

When it finishes

The card reads Saved to and the folder. The check mark in front of it is green if every file arrived exactly as sent, checked by its SHA-256 fingerprint, and gray otherwise. See File checks. Under the folder, the card offers a way to it:
  • For a single file, Open launches it in its usual app and Show in folder reveals it in File Explorer with the file selected.
  • For several files, Show in folder opens the folder.
If the file has since been moved, renamed or deleted, Open and Show in folder open the folder instead. With notifications on, a transfer that finishes or fails while Floe is in the background also raises a Windows notification, so a failure behind a minimized window is not missed. Canceling does not notify. See Notifications.

History

Click the clock icon at the top right of the card, or press Ctrl H, for a list of what you have sent and received.
Floe Desktop History with one request link drop opened: its three file names, its folder with a green check, Show in folder and Remove.

History, with a request link drop opened

Each row shows the file name (or the count, for a batch), the direction, the size, and when it happened. Times use a 24-hour clock: Today, 19:55, Yesterday, 09:12 or Jul 19, 19:55. A sent folder is listed by its own name, and a note as message.txt. A drop through a request link adds one row, titled with your label if you gave the link one, or “Nothing saved” for a drop with no label that saved no file. An empty list reads “No transfers yet”. Click any row to open it. The panel underneath lists the individual file names, the first 200 of a larger transfer, and carries Remove along the bottom. A received transfer also says where it was saved and adds Show in folder. A sent transfer has no folder to open, so it shows neither. Click the row again to close it. History holds the last 50 transfers. A send or a receive by code that failed or was canceled leaves no row. It is stored on your device only and is never sent anywhere. Remove one entry with Remove inside its open row, or Clear in the History header to remove all of them. Clear asks first, replacing itself with Clear all? and a Yes and a No, so this one cannot go wrong in a single click. Clearing history does not touch the files themselves. It is also a different control from the Clear on the send card, which empties what you have staged and offers an undo.

Nothing is ever overwritten

If a file arrives with a name you already have, Floe does not replace it. It adds a number before the extension, the same way browser downloads do:
Example
The number goes before the last dot only, so archive.tar.gz arrives as archive.tar (1).gz. A name whose only dot is its first character, such as .env, has no extension, so the number goes at its end: .env (1). This is worth knowing, because a file you expected to find under its original name may be sitting next to it with a number. The progress line shows the name actually written. After a single-file transfer, Show in folder selects the file that was really written rather than the name you were expecting. Folders are not renamed, only the files inside them. Receiving the same folder twice merges it into the existing one, with the colliding files numbered. While a file is still arriving it appears in the folder as name.ext.part, and it takes its real name only at the moment it is complete. Anything you see without .part is whole.

If a transfer stops partway

A transfer that fails or is canceled partway deletes the .part file it was writing, so nothing half-written is left behind under a finished-looking name. Files that completed before the failure are kept, and a retry can use the original name rather than a numbered one. A file that fails its check on arrival is deleted the same way. See File checks. Closing Floe while a transfer runs behaves the same way. Choosing Close stops the transfer and removes the .part file on the way out, so a clean quit leaves nothing behind. An unclean end can leave one:
  • the machine loses power
  • the process is ended from Task Manager
  • closing the file stalls, in which case Floe quits after 5 seconds without removing it
The unfinished file then sits there as a .part file rather than under a finished-looking name, and it is safe to delete. One .part file is worth keeping. When the card reads Error: A received file couldn't be saved, so it was kept with a .part ending, that file arrived whole and passed its checks. Floe could not move it to its real name, usually because an antivirus scanner or an indexer was holding it. Remove the .part ending by hand to get the file. See Troubleshooting.

Names Windows cannot represent are adjusted

Some file names are perfectly ordinary on a Mac or a Linux machine and cannot exist on Windows. A timestamp like backup:2026-08-19.log is the common case, because Windows gives the colon a special meaning. Floe adjusts the name before writing the file, and the progress line and Show in folder both use the adjusted name:
  • The characters < > : " | ? * become underscores, and so do control characters and text-direction marks.
  • Trailing dots and spaces are removed.
  • A name that is a reserved device name, such as NUL, gets an underscore in front. On Windows 10, so does a name that begins with one and a dot, such as aux.h, which is saved as _aux.h; Windows 11 keeps that name.
  • A file or top-level folder whose name starts with one ASCII character and then a colon loses those two characters, because Windows reads that start as a drive. That character can be a letter (A to Z), a digit or a symbol such as _ or #. So P:L 2025.xlsx is saved as L 2025.xlsx, and _:notes.txt as notes.txt. A real drive path such as C:\notes.txt is refused instead: see Paths that are too deep or too long are refused.
  • A backslash, which macOS and Linux allow in a name, is a folder separator on Windows: back\slash.txt arrives as slash.txt in a folder named back. A leading one is dropped when the rest of the name has no other slash or backslash, so \notes.txt arrives as notes.txt; \back\slash.txt is refused.
  • A name with nothing usable left in it, such as one made only of dots, is saved as received_file.
  • If two files end up with the same adjusted name, the second is numbered exactly as above.
The incoming preview shows the name with control characters and text-direction marks replaced, and a long name shortened with its extension kept. The progress line and History show the name as it was saved, so they match the file in your folder. This matters for more than tidiness. Before Floe Desktop 0.2.6, a file called backup:2026-08-19.log appeared in your folder as an empty file called backup, because Windows had quietly routed the contents somewhere else, and the transfer still reported success.

Paths that are too deep or too long are refused

Before anything is saved, Floe checks where each file would go. It stops the transfer, and tells the sender why, when a file’s path inside the transfer:
  • is more than 32 levels deep (31 folders and the file)
  • is longer than about 235 characters (most emoji count as 2, because Windows counts them that way)
  • starts at a drive or a root instead of inside your save folder
The card reads Error: A file's path is too deep or too long to save in this folder. Files saved before that file are kept. Ask the sender to zip deeply nested folders first. A file too large for the save drive’s file system is refused the same way, which in practice means a file of 4 GB or more going to a FAT or FAT32 drive: Error: A file is larger than the save drive can hold. The desktop app and the floe CLI apply the path limits to every receive, on every platform, and there is no setting to turn them off. The CLI prints the same refusal in its own words; see Paths that are too deep or too long. A drop through a request link is held to stricter limits on top of these. A receive with a code or a link applies none of them.

Received files are marked as downloads

Windows treats files Floe saves like downloads, and may warn you before you open one. Floe tags each file it writes with the mark of the web, the same tag Windows puts on a browser download. SmartScreen and Office Protected View then treat it like anything else from the internet. An executable that Windows does not recognize prompts before running, and an Office document opens read-only until you choose to enable editing. This is deliberate. Files arrive from another person’s device, and Windows should apply its normal caution. A drop through a request link goes further: file types that File Explorer opens by itself are saved under a name it leaves alone. Floe does not scan any file for malware. On most USB sticks and SD cards the tag cannot be kept. It needs a drive that stores it, such as an NTFS drive. FAT32 and exFAT drives, the usual format of USB sticks and SD cards, do not store it, and neither do many network shares. A file saved there arrives without the mark. The file itself is saved either way.

Contribute to global stats

After a transfer completes, Floe reports only the number of bytes to the server it is set to, for that server’s public counter. File names and contents are never sent, and the sender never reports anything. Turn it off under Settings. A drop through a request link that stops after it was accepted is reported too: once, with the bytes of the files it saved under their final names, and only with the setting on.

If something goes wrong

Last modified on November 3, 2026