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Worldbuilding

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    $\begingroup$ Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet $\endgroup$ Commented Oct 19, 2023 at 21:10
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    $\begingroup$ @RobertRapplean IIRC that was also said about hard drives. I've also heard about a "mobile backup station" project where a car full of racks full of HDDs was used to transfer a megaton of actual data from one place to another. And RichardKirk, such media usually hit the read speed problem, so while the bandwidth of such a pigeon would be large while it's in transit, the read speed might happen to be much lower than wiring the same data over the Internet with required encryption. $\endgroup$ Commented Oct 20, 2023 at 9:46
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    $\begingroup$ @RobertRapplean Amazon AWS has a service where they ship a server full of disks that you load with data, and ship back to them... $\endgroup$ Commented Oct 20, 2023 at 13:22
  • $\begingroup$ I wish I could dig up the article, but I read that Google (or some member of FAANG) actually ships HDDs inside their datacenters, because transferring that much data within their local network took too long and too much bandwidth. $\endgroup$ Commented Oct 20, 2023 at 20:56
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    $\begingroup$ Well, I feel silly now. It was the Wikipedia page that @RobertRapplean linked to! $\endgroup$ Commented Oct 20, 2023 at 20:57