I just realized... I'm pretty sure your average DVD-R burns faster than most peoples' upload speed. In other words, burning a DVD can be literally faster than uploading to the cloud.
@onf our networking teacher once made us do some math where we had to compare the speed of:
-gigabit ethernet cable going to the next town
vs
-a puli dog with a high capacity usb flash drive affixed to its collar
turns out, if the file is big enough, you should send the dog
(and I think some big company also did a data transfer by just packing HDDs into 1-2 trucks)
@grainloom @onf Google does it to set up new data centers, Amazon does it regularly enough they have a fleet and you can lease one of the trucks to move shit to their cloud servers, NASA uses it for their gigantic scientific data sets... it's really common when you get into really, really big collections of data.
@keiyakins @grainloom Yeah, if I had exabytes of data to transfer... I don't even know if the more advanced forms of ethernet that do over a gigabit would help.
@grainloom @onf Quoth an old CompSci teacher some 25 or so years ago:
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a Yugo full of backup-tapes."
@grainloom Yeah, for a very big file even gigabit might not be fast enough... still, you're getting very specialist there indeed. (That said, knowing me I'm liable to end up using that method one day.)