I raced a homing pigeon against the Internet [video]

For terabyte-scale data it might make sense to send it along with a person, but for larger amounts there are definitely services to help handle the process.

He mentioned AWS Snowmobile in the video, but they also have a lower-volume equivalent: AWS Snowball [1]. It's basically just a suitcase-sized device that you plug in, upload data to, and ship to the destination. They have some really nice features to help make the process smooth. But yeah, at its core the idea really is "pack up a lot of hard drives and have it shipped to the destination".

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

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." –Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981

i can't find a source for it, but i know nasa has done this in the past.

Not quite the same, but Peter Jackson famously used iPods to transport dailies while filming LoTR.

I suppose it mostly depends on how much the saved time is worth and how that compares to the cost of transport. I suppose there are some cases where shipping a box of drives makes sense.

I think a much more common case is having a critical machine crash and needing a backup sent to you. Depending on the bandwidth you actually have, restore by mail can be faster. And that's why companies like backblaze offer it.

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/features/restore

Restoring 8TB, which is not an unreasonable amount of data in 2023, at 40Mb/s, which is not that uncommon in much of America, still takes more than 2 days when everything goes perfectly.

FedEx'ing a 8TB drive should be able to beat that in many cases.

I introduce to you https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/

This isn't very uncommon in geospatial companies, where data is often hundreds of terabytes. I remember there was open government data you could request from USGS (high res satellite imagery of all of the US), it was technically free, but you couldn't download it. You requested it, filled out a form, and they shipped you 4-5 drives with bubblewrap.

At my previous job we had to get data off a ship after a test. The upload rate off the ship was slow. The solution was to put the data on drives, put them in a helicopter, and fly them to land.

Ditto in my previous job, there were weekly package deliveries of hard drives from Europe, which were a magnitude faster (then) compared to what was possible for a reasonable price... Of course this was all back in the day, and might only be economical these days from somewhere with major airports but no connecting fibre.

In the genomics field this is why we are working on making “data visiting” easier: https://www.ga4gh.org/product/workflow-execution-service-wes...

He mentions that as the inspiration for the video

I think the speed of drones is mostly constant and known. Pick a model, get its top speed from the spec, and just calculate it. No need to perform any real experiment.

Plus this is more fun to watch :)

I suppose it depends a lot on what drone one is actually considering, but I'll bet compared to most drones, the pigeon has much better range.