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Sneakernet, also calledsneaker net, is an informal term for the transfer of electronic information by physically moving media such asmagnetic tape,floppy disks,optical discs,USB flash drives or externalhard drives betweencomputers, rather than transmitting it over acomputer network. Sneakernets enable data transfer through physical means and offer a solution in the presence of network connections that lack reliability; however, a consequence of this physical transfer is highlatency.[1]
The term, atongue-in-cheek play onnet(work) as inInternet orEthernet, refers to walking around insneakers inside an office as the transport mechanism.[2]
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Sneakernets are in use throughout the computer universe. A sneakernet may be used when computer networks are prohibitively expensive for the owner to maintain; in high-security environments where manual inspection (for re-classification of information) is necessary; where information needs to be shared between networks with different levels of security clearance; when data transfer is impractical due tobandwidth limitations; when a particular system is simply incompatible with the local network, unable to be connected, or when two systems are not on the same network at the same time. Because sneakernets take advantage of physical media, security measures used for the transfer of sensitive information are respectively physical.
This form ofdata transfer is also used forpeer-to-peer (orfriend-to-friend) file sharing and has grown in popularity inmetropolitan areas andcollege communities. The ease of this system has been facilitated by the availability ofUSB external hard drives,USB flash drives and portable music players.[3]
TheUnited States Postal Service offers aMedia Mail service forcompact discs, among other items. This provides a viable mode of transport for long distance sneakernet use. In fact, when mailing media with sufficiently high data density such as high capacity hard drives, the throughput (data transferred per unit of time) as well as the cost per unit of data transferred may compete favorably with networked methods of data transfer.[4]
A quantum version of sneakernet was proposed in a paper by Simon Devitt and collaborators in 2016.[5]
Data analytics teams in the financial services sector often use sneakernets to transfer sensitive corporate information and information obtained fromdata mining, such as ledger entries, customer data and financial statistics. There are several reasons for this: firstly, sneakernets can generally provide very high security (and possibly more importantly, they areperceived to be secure) due to the impossibility of aman-in-the-middle attack orpacket sniffing; 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.[citation needed]
In 2021Taliban-governedAfghanistan, "computerkars" distribute Internet-derived content by hand: "Movies, music, mobile applications, iOS updates, and naughty videos. Also creating Apple IDs and social media accounts, and backing up and unlocking phones and recovering data." Thekars collectively maintain an archive of hundreds of terabytes of data. Four terabytes of the latest Indian or American movies or Turkish TV dramas, dubbed in the Afghan national languages Dari and Pashto reportedly wholesale for about 800 afghanis, or nine US dollars, while the retail price of five gigabytes of content is 100 afghanis, or one US dollar.Kars report that their earnings have dropped 90% under Taliban rule.[6]
WhenAustralia joinedUsenet in 1983, it received articles via tapes sent from the United States to theUniversity of Sydney, which disseminated data to dozens of other computers on the country's Unix network.[7]
The Rigsum Sherig Collection project[8] uses a sneakernet to distribute offline educational resources, includingKiwix andKhan Academy on a Stick,[9] to hundreds of schools and other educational institutions in the Kingdom ofBhutan. Many of the schools in Bhutan have computers or IT labs, but no Internet connection (or a very slow one).[10] The sneakernet, facilitated by teachers, distributes about 25 GB of free, open-source educational software to the schools, often using externalhard disks.
El Paquete Semanal is a roughly 1TB compilation of media, distributed weekly throughoutCuba via portable hard drives and USB memory sticks.[11]
Iran has access to a weekly data dump compilation collected through the satellite systemToosheh.
North Korean dissidents have been known to smuggle flash drives filled with western movies and television shows.[12][13][14][15][16]
TheMay 2011 raid ofOsama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad,Pakistan, 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.[17][18]
In September 2009, Durban company Unlimited IT reportedly pitted amessenger pigeon against South African ISPTelkom to transfer 4 GB of data 60 miles (97 km) fromHowick toDurban. The pigeon, carrying the data on amemory stick, arrived in one hour eight minutes, with the data taking another hour to read from the memory stick. During the same two-hour period, only about 4.2% of the data had been transferred over theADSL link.[19] A similar experiment was conducted in England in September 2010; the"pigeonnet" also proved superior.[20][21] In November 2009 the Australian comedy/current-affairs television programHungry Beast repeated this experiment. The experiment had the team transfer a 700 MB file via three delivery methods to determine which was the fastest: a carrier pigeon with amicroSD card, a car carrying aUSB Stick, or aTelstra ADSL line. The data was to be transferred a distance of 132 kilometres (82 mi) by road. The pigeon won the race with a time of approximately 1 hour 5 minutes, the car came in second at 2 hours 10 minutes, while the internet transfer did not finish, having dropped out a second time and not come back.[22]
Wizzy Digital Courier provided Internet access to schools in South Africa with poor or no network connectivity by implementingUUCP on USB memory sticks. This allowed offline cached email transport and scoops of web pages to back-fill a web cache.[23]
Google has used a sneakernet to transport large datasets, including 120TB of data from theHubble Space Telescope.[24][25] Users ofGoogle Cloud can import their data intoGoogle Cloud Storage through sneakernet.[26]Oracle similarly offers its Data Transfer Service to customers to migrate data toOracle Cloud Infrastructure or export data from it.[27]
TheSETI@home project uses a sneakernet to overcome bandwidth limitations: data recorded by theradio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico was stored on magnetic tapes which were then shipped toBerkeley, 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.[28]
Very Long Baseline Interferometry performed using theVery 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).
In 2015Amazon Web Services launched AWS Snowball, a 50 lb (23 kg), 50 TB device for transporting data to the AWS cloud;[29] and in 2016 AWS Snowmobile, a truck to transport up to 100 PB of data in one load.[30] For similar reasons, there is also a Google Transfer Appliance, an IBM Cloud Mass Data Migration device,[31] and Microsoft's Azure Data Box Disk service.[32]
Observation data from theEvent Horizon Telescope is collected on hard drives which are transported by commercial freight airplanes[33] from the various telescopes to theMITHaystack Observatory and theMax Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, where the data is analyzed.[34]
In laterUSSR, the operating system calledDEMOS was created and adapted for many types of Soviet computers by cloning versions ofUNIX that were brought into USSR on magnetic tapes bypassing theIron Curtain. This allowed for them to build theRelcom country-wideUUCP network, which would have provided globalUsenet access for Soviet users; this is why the.su ("Soviet Union")top level domain was registered in 1990.
There's a lot of band-width in astation wagon.
— Fred Gruenberger,Computing: A Second Course[35]
The firstUSENET citation of the above was July 16, 1985,[citation needed] and it was widely considered an old joke already.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of astation wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
Other alleged speakers included Tom Reidel, Warren Jackson, or Bob Sutterfield.
Although the station wagon transporting magnetic tapes is generally considered the canonical version, variants using trucks orBoeing 747s orC-5s and later storage technologies such asCD-ROMs,DVDs,Blu-rays, or SD Cards[37] have frequently appeared.
The very first problem inAndrew S. Tanenbaum's 1981 textbookComputer Networks asks the student to calculate the bandwidth of aSt. Bernard carryingfloppy disks.[38]
Sneakernet is the name of aneponymousindustrial music project.[39]
Who would ever, in this time of the greatest interconnectivity in human history, go back to shipping bytes around via snail mail as a preferred means of data transfer?
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