For those that don’t know what the sneakernet is it’s essentially transferring data through physical means. For example I would occasionally download TV shows to a hard drive for a friend who didn’t have access to the internet after they thought they cancelled their subscription to their ISP and acquired hundreds of dollars of debt. You can find a Wikipedia page for the term sneakernet here.
Have any of you set something up with your neighbors or family? I’d include LAN setups where content as shared as part of the sneakernet. Kind of similar to how stuff has been distributed in Cuba.
I’m old enough to remember when “sneakernet” meant 3.5" floppies, and was a pretty legit solution versus 2400 baud modems…
Sneakernet is OK, but I still prefer IPoAC.
That was exactly what I thought it was. Classic! And an official RFC (although introduced on April 1).
Ah you beat me to it
Yup 5-6 floppies and if one failed you could try to go back and copy one, but usually had to start over.
I got the Mac copy of Photoshop 4 from my high school this way with .sit files. It was like second to last floppy that failed (probably an ok AOL disk) and I had to go back the next day and copy it again. But it worked!
Not long after that a friend of mine got a ZIP drive, but it wasn’t SCSI, so it didn’t work with my computer. I didn’t get one until college (essential for a graphic designer in the late 90s).
Right there with you!
My first experience with the internet was Gopher.
I’m a teacher and I have a USB stick full of textbook PDFs. It wouldn’t be cool to email them on my professional account but sneakernet is the ultimate VPN lol
VirtualPhysical Private NetworkPPN! (pp network?)
My wife does this in the dental industry. She’s got loads of questionable quality USB sticks and I haven’t gotten her to copy it all to our NAS.
I send my mom a USB flash drive with photos periodically because it’s easier than getting her to use Google photos and I don’t have to manage more social media garbage.
do you transport said hardrive via yellow bag too while leaping majestically over rooftops?
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down a highway.
Damn it. Beat me to it. I’ll be first ext time.
Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks, 3rd ed., p. 83.
That was a saying in the 80s already, and still relevant today.
Back when I lived in Dubai, around 06, you’d go to some well known parking spots and some Indians guy would come to your car with a bunch of burned DVD in giant binders with all of the latest release, classics, complete series…
That was useful because internet was pretty shit and expensive. If I remember I was paying €120 a month for a theoretical 2Mb.
And there was even a “special” binder for that famous vin diesel movie. I guess he was very popular because it was very large binder that lots of people asked to see every week. It’s weird to me because pitch black was clearly his best and the only one worth rewatching but, every single week, people really seems excited to buy a new copy of xXx.
In high school I used to pass USB flash drives in an Altoid can (to protect it), good times.
I also used to be the CD-R guy (and later DVD+RW) for my group of friends, I was really into
.cuesheets and putting hidden tracks on those (including dumb shit like seeking back in the middle of a slow song would reveal heavy metal or something).These days I host a Tailscale network — unfortunately with residential upload speeds being trash, I’ve moved all my Blu-ray rips to Storj and set up a WebDAV gateway on a VPS (running Tailscale). It’s fast as hell but I’m not in love with decrypting on the VPS.
Isn’t that the plot to Mirror’s Edge?
Johnny Mnemonic’s NAS.
I sneakernet shows to my buddy who doesn’t torrent. A couple of thumbdrives that we’ve been passing back and forth for about 5 years
Last Christmas I gave a family member a flash drive containing ~10 high quality movie encodes, basically a shortlist of the year’s personal highlights I think they’d enjoy too. I don’t know if they’ve used it, but I’m going to make a habit of it until I hear otherwise. A drive for a handful movies is cheap enough to not worry about if it’s never seen again. Give them a large capacity drive however, or access to a Plex server, and paralysis of choice occurs.
Your example trails off into a non-example.
I was a teenager in the 90s and there was a whole pirate video game ring going around our school that worked this way! Someone would buy a game, and everyone would bring in their blank floppies and it would get distributed around the computer lab. Also a separate ring of banned VHS movies taped off Swedish TV for some reason.
We used to play Halo CE and Minecraft at school with copies saved on thumb drives. Before that I installed Zoo Tycoon on one of the computers in my elementary school library.
I personally download stuff for my friend who’s been stuck in a personal care place for the last ~6 months, getting him shows and movies he’s wanted to watch but never had the time before.
I often torrent on my Raspberry Pi as I go about my day, transfer to my laptop via FTP, double check for file integrity, then transfer to a 1TB “flash drive” I made out of a M.2 drive and enclosed bay at his care facility.
Yeah, that’s been a thing for ages. All the way back to tapes being copied because my parents had the best double tape deck out of anyone I knew. Vhs tapes of skinamax (skinemax? Idk how that should be spelled lol) movies, or regular ones being swapped around.
I still swap files in the same way. Well not the same I don’t use magnetic tape lol. But yeah, if someone wants something, and I have it, all I need is something to put it on. Since I have a disc burner, it doesn’t have to be a drive, though they’d need a drive to access anything on a disc, which gets less and less common. I don’t loan out thumb drives to just anyone, but I’ll usually be glad to copy files to theirs. Hell, that’s actually my preferred method for swapping files. It’s faster and less prone to hassles than p2p methods.
Me and my best friend serve as each other’s off site storage too. He keeps a drive with important/hard to replace files with me, and vice versa. When we visit, we’ll swap out with a second drive that’s updated. Ends up with triple redundancy, since there will be the last drive at each other’s, plus the second drive that’s being updated between swaps, as well as the original files on whatever device is the main source. I have another drive like that that I swap out at my sister’s.
Most of those drives we swap aren’t media, though there is some of that, what with hard to find stuff being easier to keep multiple copies of instead of trying to hunt down again. The media files, those are open to copy off, so it’s a form of sneakernet in that regard, rather than only being backups of stuff of our own.
The problem I’ve run into is versioning, determining which collection is most “ahead”. We’ve had a large drive which was once used collectively by my family, but with everyone moving around it’s been demoted to a more downstream status.
Would the collection just keep growing or would you delete content? Maybe periodically so if you haven’t watched the new Bettlejuice movie within a couple weeks it would get deleted? Maybe they wouls hold onto stuff until you’ve got it and watched it?
The idea of versioning it with your family stash is neat
It can and does continue to grow. We do not delete content. There is a trove of old (not recently acquired) files on these drives that several members have not gotten around to yet.
I am currently trying to devise a system wherein these different drives can be synced across geographically distant locations. Like a bi-directional rsync system which doesn’t remove extraneous files from the destination.
