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Comment by noiwillnot | Hacker News Reader

How people goes about downloading/mirroring sci-hub? I assume you cannot start torrenting from your home in Texas without getting into problems. Do you get a seedbox? You are in a state like China or Russia?

Getting these > 70 TB to a residential address does not seems easy.

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If you are serious: you can download it to a seedbox, connect to it and download it to your residential address over scp. The storage is a solved problem, not cheap but then you are trying to store a significant chunk of all papers :)

> download it to a seedbox

Or if you already have a VPN provider, check their terms to see what their torrent policies are. Last I checked mine permitted such traffic in a few specific datacenters.

That solves the routing problem, but not the pipe size problem.

70TB over 1Gbps: 6+ days

70TB over 500Mbps: 12+ days

70TB over 100Mbps: 2+ months

70TB over 50Mbps: 4+ months

70TB over 25Mbps: 8+ months

70TB over 10Mbps: 21+ months

70TB over 5Mbps: 3 years

70TB over 1Mbps: 17 years

70TB via mail: equivalent to 100Mbps (international) to 1Gbps+ (local) depending on distance, but only cost-effective if an equivalent connection is unavailable due to average weight (and price) of sufficient HDDs, eg, 3x18TB = ~$1200, combined weight approx 1kg.

Does Amazon allow torrenting? Or could you have your seedbox push the data to S3 from $WHEREVER? If so, you could possibly use Snowball[1] to get the data to your residence.

[1]: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/projects/migrate-peta...

I might be reading this wrong (I always have problems calculating AWS costs), but this seems VERY expensive. Much more than paying a 10Gbps internet plan for a year where I live.

Possibly, but is cost the only factor? What if you don't want to wait a year to get the data? Or don't want to saturate the 'net connection you're using with just this download? And what about error recovery, since no 'net link is going to be 100% stable for an entire year...

Not saying Snowball is the best idea by any means. But I can see how it might be worth considering.

Given the cloud ecosystem (and associated markets), I would be noteworthily surprised if an average datacenter/colo's smart-hands facilities wouldn't be able to accept me mailing in some HDDs, having them attached (possibly by renting multiple additional servers and having them installed in there), then later disconnecting them and printing a supplied prepaid shipping label to return them.

(I'd provide an appropriately oversized tip to ensure a near-unreasonable amount of bubble wrap is included in the return.)

>I assume you cannot start torrenting from your home in Texas without getting into problems.

Why?

Legal threats from some IP holders. I assume that the situation with the other part of libgen (the book one) should be similar.

They are not pursuing individual papers or archives like this

Get a VPN

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