Hacker News Reader

Comment by lattalayta | Hacker News Reader

I recently found out that that is referred to as the sneakernet, and is actually still a preferred way to transfer a lot of data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

View on HN

AWS has a little-known service for trucks transporting 100PB of data in shipping containers:

https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

-- Andrew S. Tanenbaum (circa 1989)

What do their prices look like for 100 pb?

It's probably not bad compared to the monthly recurring you're about to get hit with for sitting in all of those bits.

Certainly less than they would charge you for the bandwidth if you sent them over the wire.

Damn. I once spoke with a friend who helped a museum in Rio de Janeiro to migrate its backups using AWS Snowball, but thats a whole new level.

https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/

Which one? IMS?

I always wondered who would actually use this. Apparently a company called DigitalGlobe[0], which has a large collection of satellite images.

[0]: https://www.networkworld.com/article/3154898/this-company-is...

For when your forklift migration needs a literal forklift.

In A Fire Upon the Deep, the Skroderiders' cargo was a one-time pad.

If you send someone several TB of random data on hard disk, you can now very securely send them several TB worth of encrypted data. It's many years of audio of reasonable quality, 1tb is about 72 days of raw 44.khz 16 bit stereo audio. With some speech codecs, that could be years of voice data. One time pad can be bigger than a notepad.

My lab still does this (or, will do it when we’re finally allowed back in).

We do a little bit of compression right on the instrument’s computer. After that, a briskly-walking postdoc can move a few terabytes a minute. The exact rate depends on whether they stop for coffee, but it always blows our internal 100 Mbps network out of the water.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com