Private Paste Links

Sometimes you need to hand one person a snippet — an API response, a config block, an error dump — without it living forever in a Slack channel's search index or sitting in someone's inbox attachments. A files.link paste is unlisted by design: the view URL is an unguessable UUID v4, the view page sends robots noindex/nofollow so search engines never crawl it, and nothing about the paste is browsable or listed publicly.

There is no directory, no 'recent pastes' feed, no discovery surface at all. Anyone with the link can read it; nobody who lacks the link can find it. On top of that, signed-in users pick the lifetime: 1 hour, 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, or permanent. That expiry is enforced server-side — when a paste expires it returns 404 and a cleanup cron removes the stored object, so an expired link is genuinely dead, not just hidden.

Anonymous pastes work with no signup at all and auto-expire after 24 hours, capped at 100KB; an account raises the cap to 1MB and unlocks the custom-expiry windows plus a dashboard where you can delete any of your own pastes early. The practical pattern: paste a production query you're debugging with a 1-hour expiry and drop the link in a thread — it self-destructs before it can leak into long-term chat history.

Or paste an onboarding config with a 7-day window for a new hire. Compared to emailing the snippet (permanent in two mailboxes, no syntax highlighting, hard to revoke) or pasting it inline in chat (mangled formatting, indexed in search, impossible to expire), an unlisted link with a real expiry clock is both cleaner and safer. The view renders with syntax highlighting across 26 languages, so a config or a stack trace shows up readable instead of as a wall of monospace.

One honest caveat on privacy: unlisted is not the same as encrypted. Pastes are encrypted at rest by the underlying storage, but there is no client-side or per-paste encryption and no password gate — for genuinely sensitive secrets, set the shortest expiry and share over an end-to-end encrypted channel rather than treating an unlisted link as a vault. For language-specific paste flavors with highlighting tuned to each grammar, see the JSON, SQL, Python, YAML, and Markdown paste pages.