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geocrasher

5GB on my local network: Windows File Share, Rsync, or HTTP depending on source/destination

5GB on Internet: Upload to my OVH VPS and HTTP or Rsync it to its destination

10TB, local or Internet: Physical Hard Drive.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes!

https://www.tidbitsfortechs.com/2013/09/never-underestimate-...

And since you now buy 1TB micro SD cards, so perhaps I'd split the file 11 ways (no way it'll fit exactly) and send them via carrier pigeon. Or heck, I could just tape them to a drone and hope they aren't damaged in the crash. There's lots of ways to move data around. Maybe you want to UUENCODE it and submit bad URL's to a servers log so that it can be exfiltrated later? It would probably take a very, very long time, but could be done. I call it "CURLyTP"

https://miscdotgeek.com/curlytp-every-web-server-is-a-dead-d...

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10TB, local or Internet: Physical Hard Drive.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes!

In Poland there is an option to send package via train for 8$. Just go to station and give package to conductor/train guard, few hours later receiver can get it at destination station. Sending HDDs full of raw video footage this way is very popular among video editors here.

In the US, you can ship using Greyhound bus lines. I wouldn't recommend it for this scenario, but I know people that ship auto parts around this way. Ship up to 100lbs for some incredibly cheap rates.

http://www.shipgreyhound.com/

This looks incredibly expensive and not competitive at all.

Over $20 for a 1 lb package, over $60 for a 50 lb package from Oakland to Los Angeles and a quoted time of four days station to station.

I can overnight a 50 lb package for $35, door to door, over that distance with the appropriate FedEx account and discounts. The ground service would cost me $30 without any discounts...

In my (limited) experience, the Greyhound shipping service becomes competitive when shipments are very bulky (like body parts) more so than when they are heavy.

You mean auto body parts, right?

Well, other body parts probably also fit the bulky description. But they'd also be heavy, I guess.

It may be competing with freight, instead of fedex. Auto parts don't always fit in a Priority (Small) box.

Many of the airlines in the us allow this as well - but more expensive - you can basically send something on a specific flight for like ~$100

https://www.unitedcargo.com/shipping/productsAndShipping.jsp...

This reminded me of the mail coaches in express trains of India. Some train routes still have a mail qualifier in their name. Mail by rail.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Express_trains_in_India

That’s a really cool idea actually

Same thing happens in Greece with buses. It's a very popular way for moms to send home-made food to their single/university student sons.

I remember watching a Top Gear special in India which showed the delivery system for hot food for workers from their wives - the food was placed in metal tins, loaded into pallets, driven to trains, offloaded from trains, and driven to the workers. The reliability of the system was surprisingly high IIRC

Dabbawalla is the name you’re looking for, and that’s more local than some of the other things suggested in the thread

In Croatia as well :)

In Laos the (mini)buses were the most reliable way to ship anything. We had 3 motorbikes strapped to the top and a sat cattycorner to a caged chicken on my trek through the north in a 15-seater minibus.

Balkan brothers!

Amtrak does it too

Oh that's fantastic - do you know how many packages they take? How does the receiver know when their package is coming? (other than the train timetable)

do you know how many packages they take?

As many as can safely fit into conductor's compartment. They can refuse to take package if it would get train delayed - so better have exact amount of cash because card readers on trains are extremely slow.

How does the receiver know when their package is coming? (other than the train timetable)

Train timetable only. For most trains delay information is published on operator's website. Delays are rare, except holiday season.

If receiver misses their package it goes to closest warehouse, then receiver is called and can request delivery by another train, but needs to pay another 4$ on pick-up (plus fee for every day package spends in warehouse).

OVH is great if it’s not business critical! As the semi-official safe haven of piracy in Europe, OVH’s network has uhh...seen better days.

Since credit cards go through the mail, I assume you can send SDs in an envelope for a few cents, right? Fast and cheap. Although this anecdote says USPS radiation scanning might wipe it, anyone have experience? https://www.thewanderinglensman.com/2014/01/warning-dont-mai...

> USPS radiation scanning might wipe it

I'm skeptical of this, since when I order microSD cards online they arrive via USPS and have a perfectly valid partition table and FAT filesystem on them.

I've sent flash media through mail without problems. As well as hard drives with disks. Never had an issue.

I would assume that mail scanning is similar to the x-ray scanner at the airport, and any SD card or hard drive that cant handle that is useless.

Could you imagine having your laptop and camera wiped every time you jumped on a plane.

Film is mailed all of the time without issue. Film would be ruined by the luggage scanning (i.e. higher power) machines though most film is usually OK with the lower power carry-on scanning machines.

TSA opened my checked luggage to manually inspect the box of 9-track tapes.

> Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes!

The exact quote [0] by Andrew Tanenbaum is: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.".

Obligatory xkcd [1].

I met Andy Tanenbaum in 2008 at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. I was the Technology Evangelist for AWS in Europe, giving a seminar there on cloud computing.

I loved him. Funny, smart. I didn't even know he was American until I met him in person (having studied computer science, you're not exactly sure of someone's nationality solely based on his last name).

[0]: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum

[1]: https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

> I didn't even know he was American until I met him in person

Nothing wrong with that. Some my best friends are American

Some 2010 vintage calculations, when 16GB microSD cards were considered "big", estimates 275PB would fit in a 1985 Volvo 240:

http://dansdata.com/gz105.htm

A 2020 update for that would probably use 256 or 512GB cards resulting in around 4.4 or 8.8EB (And probably twice that again if the cargo capacity of a typical 2020 SUV equivalent of a 1985 Volvo is assumed...)

Pedantically, the overall bandwidth in that scenario is exactly the same as the recording bandwidth of one backup tape. Since bandwidth doesn't scale.

The data transfer rate, however, scales linearly with cardinality...

You wouldn't want to keep all of your proverbial eggs in one basket. Split the file into a multi-volume archive and create a par2/par3 parity volume set. Distribute parts of the parity set and parts of the data archive amongst m pigeons such that you only need n pigeons to arrive on time without having gotten lost, shot or eviscerated by hawks, and you can reliably rebuild the original data set with fault tolerance that also handles read/write errors on the MicroSD cards.

Would you share details of the design of your “ohs vps” facility?

Just thought about AWS Snowmobile.

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