Sneakernet - Usage Examples

Usage Examples

• The May 2011 raid of Osama Bin Laden's compound revealed that he used a series of USB thumb drives to store his email drafts. A courier of his would then take the saved emails to a nearby Internet cafe and send them out to the desired recipients.
• In September 2009, Durban company Unlimited IT reportedly pitted a carrier pigeon against South African ISP Telkom to transfer 4 GB of data 60 miles (97 km) from Howick to Durban. The pigeon, carrying the data on a memory stick, arrived in one hour eight minutes, with the data taking another hour to transfer off of the memory stick. During the same two-hour period, only about 4% of the data had been transferred over the ADSL link. A similar experiment was conducted in England in September 2010; the "pigeonnet" also proved superior.
• Google has reportedly used a sneakernet to transport datasets too large for current computer networks, up to 120TB in size.
• The SETI@home project uses a sneakernet to overcome bandwidth limitations: data recorded by the radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico is stored on magnetic tapes which are then shipped to Berkeley, California for processing. In 2005, Jim Gray reported sending hard drives and even "metal boxes with processors" to transport large amounts of data by postal mail.
• Many film editing and visual effects companies transfer large film-scans using hard drives shipped via courier (to reduce bandwidth bills, and to reserve bandwidth for more time-critical transfers)
• Wizzy Digital Courier provides Internet access to schools with poor or no network connectivity by implementing UUCP on USB memory sticks. This allows email transport and scoops of web pages that back-fill a web cache.
• When home broadband access was less common, many people downloaded large files over their workplace networks and took them home by sneakernet. Today when home broadband is more common, sometimes technical workers at institutions with congested WAN links do the reverse: downloading data at home in the evening and carrying the files to work on USB flash drives.
• In the early demoscene, the primary method of exchanging data was using snail mail to exchange floppies between groups. Each group usually had at least one person designated as a swapper, who would exchange news, data and productions with swappers from other groups this way. The best swappers were known to send and receive over 100 mails a month.
• Online DVD rental services such as Netflix and GameFly are effectively sneakernets, as they deliver data on DVDs and other media via regular mail.
• Petroleum seismic surveys routinely record field data which are many terabytes in size. A cluster computer is required to process these data, and may take a year or more, during which time the field crew will wish to work in other areas. The field data are generally hand-carried on tape, and increasingly on hard disk inserts, to the processing centre.
• Data analytics teams in the financial services sector often use sneakernets to transfer sensitive corporate information, such as ledger entries, customer data and financial statistics. There are several reasons for this: firstly, sneakernets can provide very high security (and possibly more importantly, they are perceived to be secure); secondly, the volumes of data concerned are often extremely high; and thirdly, setting up secure network links between the client business and the analytics team's facilities is often either impossible or an extremely convoluted process.
• Amazon Web Services allows transferring data between the cloud and a physical storage device.
• Very Long Baseline Interferometry performed using the Very Long Baseline Array ships hard drives to a data reduction site in Socorro, New Mexico. They refer to their data transfer mechanism as "HDOA" (Hard Drives On Airplane).