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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down a highway.
That was a saying in the 80s already, and still relevant today.
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.
do you transport said hardrive via yellow bag too while leaping majestically over rooftops?
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).
