Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet
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Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet
1–10 of 85 posts
Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet
#2I used sneakernet years ago, mostly as a last mile connection to internet. I would go to place with more bandwidth , download stuff burn it to CD , or save it on external hard drive, and go back.
I think many people still do it like that. There are 3.7 B people in the World without internet.
Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet
#3Being a teen in the 90s, sneakernet was sometimes even more fascinating and exciting to me than internet connectivity. It had an air of secrecy to it, little bundles of precious data carried between a select group of people on various, often cumbersome and/or expensive storage media. When everything is connected by a bunch of wires, it’s just too easy.
Sometimes I wish for a return a that feeling of preciousness, instead of incomprehensible amounts of data carelessly shoved down wider and wider tubes.
For my own sneakernet-like uses, I turn to git-annex. See use case “The Nomad” here: https://git-annex.branchable.com/
Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet
#4I used sneakernet years ago, mostly as a last mile connection to internet. I would go to place with more bandwidth , download stuff burn it to CD , or save it on external hard drive, and go back. I think many people still do it like that. There are 3.7 B people in the World without internet.
Back in the day when I went to what you could describe as an engineering high-school we had very limited internet in the dormitory as well as at home. So we organized into teams, where the leader would gather Warez links for his teammates to download during the weekend.
On Sunday and Monday, back at the dorm, we would upload all the series, movies and stuff to our data hoarders ftp server, giving many more people access, who in turn would copy the stuff to USB HDDs to carry it to school. There it got copied to our classmates storage and from there it got distributed throughout the region, reaching I don't know how many people.
My team, doing mostly series and games, had about 10-16MBits, all teams together reached an unheard of (for consumer internet in that region) bandwidth. We just couldn't have done it alone
Good times
Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet
#5That's cool. However I don't like the idea of plugging in USB sticks and having them modified by anything. OS X was (and still is) a terrible offender: plug in a USB drive and the OS sneakily inserts stuff outside partitions (so you cannot easily find it but if you "dd" and take the hash of the drive it's different before and after simply plugging it in an OS X computer: to me that is pure madness and it took me a while to figure out what was going on).
Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet
#6It’s cool and sounds like reinventing UUCP. Which has the advantage of serving as a transparent transport for ordinary email.
Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet
#7I used sneakernet years ago, mostly as a last mile connection to internet. I would go to place with more bandwidth , download stuff burn it to CD , or save it on external hard drive, and go back. I think many people still do it like that. There are 3.7 B people in the World without internet.
Back in the day when I went to what you could describe as an engineering high-school we had very limited internet in the dormitory as well as at home. So we organized into teams, where the leader would gather Warez links for his teammates to download during the weekend. On Sunday and Monday, back at the dorm, we would upload all the series, movies and stuff to our data hoarders ftp server, giving many more people acc…
I ran an open CIFS volume (windows share) in our dorm for music and movies. This was just after Napster went down but before Limewire or something. So the only way to share music was to upload everything you had and have access to whatever everyone else uploaded. You just dropped what you had in a writable folder and it would organize it in read only folders, doing any deduping for identical files and flagging non-identical files with the same meta or anything it didn’t understand.
Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet
#8Being a teen in the 90s, sneakernet was sometimes even more fascinating and exciting to me than internet connectivity. It had an air of secrecy to it, little bundles of precious data carried between a select group of people on various, often cumbersome and/or expensive storage media. When everything is connected by a bunch of wires, it’s just too easy. Sometimes I wish for a return a that feeling of preciousness, ins…
git-annex by default will consider your data dead when it can't be checked in real time, but overriding will trust the data will survive offline forever.
I'd love for it to have some kind of expiry on it after which I need to fsck it.
Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet
#9Being a teen in the 90s, sneakernet was sometimes even more fascinating and exciting to me than internet connectivity. It had an air of secrecy to it, little bundles of precious data carried between a select group of people on various, often cumbersome and/or expensive storage media. When everything is connected by a bunch of wires, it’s just too easy. Sometimes I wish for a return a that feeling of preciousness, ins…
Forever memories of high school around 1990, passing around backpacks fulls of floppies in front of our uncomprehending classmates...
And of course a lot of time spent copying - that second floppy drive made my life so much easier !
Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet
#10That's cool. However I don't like the idea of plugging in USB sticks and having them modified by anything. OS X was (and still is) a terrible offender: plug in a USB drive and the OS sneakily inserts stuff outside partitions (so you cannot easily find it but if you "dd" and take the hash of the drive it's different before and after simply plugging it in an OS X computer: to me that is pure madness and it took me a wh…
Pretty sure Apple at the very least injects a hidden file that easy to see if you plug the drive into an Apple device then into a non-Apple device; no idea why they are adding it, though 99% sure it is for file operation administration.
Edit: Appears at least one of the files added is called “ “.DS_Store” and is still around:
https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/02/19/google-drive-user...