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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks, 3rd ed., p. 83.
Damn it. Beat me to it. I’ll be first ext time.
That was a saying in the 80s already, and still relevant today.
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.
Ah you beat me to it
That was exactly what I thought it was. Classic! And an official RFC (although introduced on April 1).
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.
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.
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
Shiiiiiiiit, transferring stuff via physical media takes me back to high school. It was mostly porn videos to my friends, never charged a dime, only asked them to give me a blank CD
Haven’t done anything like that since I finished college. During those years, it was mostly sharing ripped versions of games that we could play straight from the USB stick on the college computers, mostly Counter Strike 1.6 , much to my distaste as I much preferred other games like Digital Paintball 2 and Age of Empires 2. Also a bit ironic that, despite all of us being CompSci students, I seemed to be the only one who was willing to endure the “pains” of setting up a SNES emulator so we could play Bomberman over the LAN.
Never heard of paintball 2, but dang, an fps from 1998 that’s still recording updates??? That’s nuts!
I just shipped n 8TB drive of children’s shows to a friend. First, because many of the shows I wanted to recommend him aren’t on streaming services and second, because he’s moving to the mountains soon, where the internet may or may not be available.
Other than this instance, the last time was likely around 2007.
You know, there was a much shorter range version of this that was predominantly used in offices and college computer rooms. It was called FrisbeeNet.
