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I guess you didn't notice that Google Cloud has a thing that competes with Snowball?

https://cloud.google.com/transfer-appliance

Also, if you want to know an extreme edge case that can't (currently) be done any other way, consider the astronomical observatories at the South Pole.

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I said Snowmobile doesn't make sense. Snowball makes total sense. The economics are entirely different.

Antarctica was the only place that came to mind, but I wasn't sure about the costs of getting a shipping container in / out.

For the south pole, they use C-130s, and not standard shipping containers. You can see the little ones that they use in the photo at the bottom of https://www.nsf.gov/geo/opp/support/lc130.jsp

Right, but Snowmobile is packaged as a shipping container because it has a small datacenter inside, so unless you can fit the assembled 45ft container in the plane, I don't think this works?

Those are big fucking planes, so maybe you can?

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