What's your experience with the sneakernet?

Corroded@leminal.space to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 62 points –

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.

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I'm old enough to remember when "sneakernet" meant 3.5" floppies, and was a pretty legit solution versus 2400 baud modems...

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

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 .cue sheets 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My upload speed is horrible, so I download items, compare my stuff to my friend,(freefilesync) then copy to an external ssd for them to import.

Is it just one friend? How would you compare using FFS versus creating and sharing a torrent?

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.

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.

It's been a long time since I pirated over sneakernet. I shared a lot of music with friends that way though. I had an mp3 player with a big hard drive and it had a USB host port, so you could plug in a flash drive and copy files.

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 remember everyone sharing files (mostly movies) via usb in my IT class, in vocational school. a lot of people came to me because i had all the episodes of samurai jack (it wasnt remastered yet, so getting the full series was difficult). that was half a decade ago though, and i haven't had a reason to do it since

My dad used to occasionally get DVDs from a friend at work. Still have a shitton of them in the basement. Now my dad judges me for pirating but I'm like you did the same thing!

It's like how a lot of parents these days don't think their "jailbroken" Firestick is pirating

I transfer shows and movies to people I work with via external hard drive all the time. When I was a kid we'd copy pc games and CDs we got and share them around.

well I setup a sneakernet script for my parents as they live in a deadzone and only got shitty celluar. I lived a few hours away so my script would grab the movies and shows for the past few months in its search and cp them to my disk. then i would run another script once i get to their place to upload it to windows and put it in the right folder. subsequent iterations the scripts were changed to shell script and python. their computer now runs Debian too. works great.

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.

back in the dial-up and bbs days, i kept plenty of floppy disks (and later CDs) with my favorite media on them to play when i visited friends. in more recent history i have placed my digital media backups on drives to play at friends' houses. it's nice to be offline now and then.

while not technically sneakernet, we did have a piratebox set up at an office that i leased for backing up media collectively.