Sneakernet / Internet Bridge

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kenkeniff

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#115430 25-Mar-2013 20:33

I'm currently going through the process of setting up my Google Drive account and sync'ing about 100GB of personal data to it.

Unfortunately based on my broadband speed I've estimated it's going to take over a week with my PC running 24/7 to sync all my data from my home PC to Google's cloud.

This got me thinking; would anyone make use of a local service where you could courier a hard drive / USB containing your data and have them upload it to a [FTP/WebDav/Cloud] server of your choosing using an enterprise-grade internet connection (100-1000mb/s)?

In the reverse you could request a large [File/Torrent/ISO etc] to be downloaded for you and couriered to you on USB.

I think it could be a useful service for making - for example - initial uploads to services like Google Drive, DropBox, Amazon Glacier etc.

Assuming issues around security / encryption / potential for abuse were addressed, who would use such a service?

jonherries

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#786928 25-Mar-2013 21:02

I have thought about this, mainly to do with uploading, and usually regarding photos and videos.

I do agree it is slow, not sure whether a service would be much faster? AKAIK I thought that the internet and the switches/routers were configured to prefer DL to UL?

Jon

Zeon

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#786956 25-Mar-2013 22:06

To be honest, unless its Australia even on a 100mbps connection your speed isn't going to be that great to the USA (if its a single stream) due to TCP limitations. If it were a NZ based services, that would be a different situation.....

Have you thought about VDSL2 or can you get UFB?

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kenkeniff

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#786990 26-Mar-2013 06:26

Zeon: To be honest, unless its Australia even on a 100mbps connection your speed isn't going to be that great to the USA (if its a single stream) due to TCP limitations. If it were a NZ based services, that would be a different situation.....

Have you thought about VDSL2 or can you get UFB?

I can't get anything other than ADSL at home however I'm walking distance from a data center with carrier-grade connections. I don't see why with proper optimisation (which could include UDP tunneling, concurrent TCP connections etc) you wouldn't be able to offer speeds significantly faster than available to most users, just comes down to cost / benefit.

c3rn

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#787105 26-Mar-2013 11:23

Good idea but once UFB arrives to the masses then the service would be redundant (unless your concern was data caps instead of speed).

Would you also need to supply your user/pass to the company in order for them to upload to your Google Drive/ Dropbox etc?

kenkeniff

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#787121 26-Mar-2013 11:43

c3rn: Good idea but once UFB arrives to the masses then the service would be redundant (unless your concern was data caps instead of speed).

For users wanting to transfer 100's of GB to TBs of data internationally a carrier-grade connection capable of scaling up to 10GBit with a 1:1 contention ratio is still going to far exceed any 50-100Mbit UFB fibre connection with international traffic shared by a bunch of users.

c3rn: Would you also need to supply your user/pass to the company in order for them to upload to your Google Drive/ Dropbox etc?

Most of these services provide API's or sharing options which should allow files to be pushed into them without having to supply user passwords (rather account 'tokens' probably).

nickb800

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#787123 26-Mar-2013 11:44

To get around the user/pass problem perhaps it could be more like this:
1) You give them physical media - usb hard drive etc - and they plug it into their system
2) You get home, log into a personal VM at the datacentre that has access to your USB drive, and then you log into google drive/dropbox/whatever and tell it what to upload and to where

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kenkeniff

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#787147 26-Mar-2013 12:13

If you're willing to go through that effort there are NZ-based VPS providers that will mount physical media and could probably provide reasonable bandwidth, otherwise I'd be looking for a more seamless process.

i.e.
1. Complete online form with upload destination and payment details (charged per GB)
2. Print packing slip
3. Courier media (USB, SATA, SCSI, BluRay etc)
4. Data uploaded / notification sent
5. Media returned

GregV

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#787158 26-Mar-2013 12:31

But isn't it a bit pointless being concerned about your username/password, given that they have your actual data on the media? Admittedly not all of it, but with the 100GB example given above, certainly a large chunk of it.

Edit - using nickb800's suggestion, combined with encrypting/bitlockering the media would get around this.

kenkeniff

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#787194 26-Mar-2013 13:06

There are a number of ways to increase the security of a service like this however at the end of the day most web services rely on an element of trust of the service provider.

Even with services like mega.co.nz there's no guarantee that if they really wanted to look at your data they couldn't just serve a custom .js script to your IP and upload your private key to their servers...likewise with many other web services, ISP's, telcos, banks etc.

Likewise anyone with physical access to the server has access to your VM, and in turn your passwords.

c3rn

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#787244 26-Mar-2013 14:15

kenkeniff:
For users wanting to transfer 100's of GB to TBs of data internationally a carrier-grade connection capable of scaling up to 10GBit with a 1:1 contention ratio is still going to far exceed any 50-100Mbit UFB fibre connection with international traffic shared by a bunch of users.

Fair point but how much demand would there be. Your example of moving HD videos and requesting ISO's/files surely could be done by a 100/50 UFB connection?

kenkeniff

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#787258 26-Mar-2013 14:31

Personally I would have used the service a handful of times;
1 - For making the initial sync with Google Drive as mentioned.
2 - I once worked on a project which involved downloading a local (30-40GB) archive of Wikipedia.
3 - Other projects have involved downloading 10-20GB of linux distros.
4 - Moving / syncing local servers to international data-centers.

I don't know if there would be much more public demand hence my question.

I guess it's kind of like how Amazon EC2 can make super-computer-like processing available to the general public by the hour. You may only need that power/speed for a short time however without it you couldn't (practically) do what you wanted to do.

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richms

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#790328 1-Apr-2013 21:50

I have a similar thing with crashplan, many TB still to back up and the lousy upload speeds to them sees only a few gigs a night get done during the VDSL's free offpeak times.

Richard rich.ms

kenkeniff

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#790346 1-Apr-2013 22:01

I discovered Amazon actually provide this service for ~US$85 + storage media costs + shipping.

See: http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/

You can ship your USB drive and have it uploaded/download to/from Amazon S3/EBS/Glacier.

From there you should be able to move it around the net fairly easily using their large pipes (even if it means firing up a Windows EC2 instance and installing some client software).