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.
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.