I’m writing a program that wraps around dd to try and warn you if you are doing anything stupid. I have thus been giving the man page a good read. While doing this, I noticed that dd supported all the way up to Quettabytes, a unit orders of magnitude larger than all the data on the entire internet.
This has caused me to wonder what the largest storage operation you guys have done. I’ve taken a couple images of hard drives that were a single terabyte large, but I was wondering if the sysadmins among you have had to do something with e.g a giant RAID 10 array.
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Not that big by today’s standards, but I once downloaded the Windows 98 beta CD from a friend over dialup, 33.6k at best. Took about a week as I recall.
I remember downloading the scene on American Pie where Shannon Elizabeth strips naked over our 33.6 link and it took like an hour, at an amazing resolution of like 240p for a two minute clip 😂
And then you busted after 15 seconds?
Totally worth it.
Yep, downloaded XP over 33.6k modem, but I’m in NZ so 33.6 was more advertising than reality, it took weeks.
In similar fashion, downloaded dude where’s my car, over dialup, using at the time the latest tech method - a file download system that would split the file into 2mb chunks and download them in order.
It took like 4 days.
I obviously downloaded a car after seeing that obnoxious anti-piracy ad.
I’m currently backing up my /dev folder to my unlimited cloud storage. The backup of the file
/dev/randomis running since two weeks.That’s silly. You should compress it before uploading.
No wonder. That file is super slow to transfer for some reason. but wait till you get to /dev/urandom. That file hat TBs to transfer at whatever pipe you can throw at it…
Cool, so I learned something new today. Don’t run
cat /dev/randomWhy not try /dev/urandom?
😹
Ya know, if not for the other person’s comment, I might have been gullible enough to try this…
I’m guessing this is a joke, right?
/dev/random and other “files” in /dev are not really files, they are interfaces which van be used to interact with virtual or hardware devices. /dev/random spits out cryptographically secure random data. Another example is /dev/zero, which spits out only zero bytes.
Both are infinite.
Not all “files” in /dev are infinite, for example hard drives can (depending on which technology they use) be accessed under /dev/sda /dev/sdb and so on.
I’m aware of that. I was quite sure the author was joking, with the slightest bit of concern of them actually making the mistake.
In grad school I worked with MRI data (hence the username). I had to upload ~500GB to our supercomputing cluster. Somewhere around 100,000 MRI images, and wrote 20 or so different machine learning algorithms to process them. All said and done, I ended up with about 2.5TB on the supercomputer. About 500MB ended up being useful and made it into my thesis.
Don’t stay in school, kids.
You should have said no to math, it’s a helluva drug
golden 😂😂
Entire drive/array backups will probably be by far the largest file transfer anyone ever does. The biggest I’ve done was a measly 20TB over the internet which took forever.
Outside of that the largest “file” I’ve copied was just over 1TB which was a SQL file backup for our main databases at work.
+1
From an order of magnitude perspective, the max is terabytes. No “normal” users are dealing with petabytes. And if you are dealing with petabytes, you’re not using some random poster’s program from reddit.
For a concrete cap, I’d say 256 tebibytes…
brother?..
10TB is child’s play
I work in cinema content so hysterical laughter
Interesting! Could you give some numbers? And what do you use to move the files? If you can disclose obvs
A small dcp is around 500gb. But that’s like basic film shizz, 2d, 5.1 audio. For comparison, the 3D deadpool 2 teaser was 10gb.
Aspera’s commonly used for transmission due to the way it multiplexes. It’s the same protocolling behind Netflix and other streamers, although we don’t have to worry about preloading chunks.
My laughter is mostly because we’re transmitting to a couple thousand clients at once, so even with a small dcp thats around a PB dropped without blinking
Eh, what’s a dcp?
Digital Cinema Package; basically the movie file you’re watching when you’re in a movie theater.
Digital Cinema Package. Films come out in a buncha files that rather resemble a dvd rip. You got your video files (still called reels!) and your audio files, maybe some subtitle files and other bits and pieces and your assetmap (list of files) all in a big fat folder collectively called a DCP
That article was a weird mix of insider info and wild inaccuracies
Oh sorry! Here ya go!
In the early 2000s I worked on an animated film. The studio was in the southern part of Orange County CA, and the final color grading / print (still not totally digital then) was done in LA. It was faster to courier a box of hard drives than to transfer electronically. We had to do it a bunch of times because of various notes/changes/fuck ups. Then the results got courier’d back because the director couldn’t be bothered to travel for the fucking million dollars he was making.
Oh yeah I worked in animation for a bit too. Those 4K master files are no joke lol
You legally have to tell us if that movie was Shrek.
Hah, nope. Shrek was made in Glendale, so they probably had everything on site or right next door.
Fucking hell the raws woulda been gigantic
I used to work in the same industry. We transferred several PBs from West US to Australia using Aspera via thick AWS pipes. Awesome software.
Hahahah did you enjoy Australian Internet? It’s wonderfully archaic
(MPS, Delux, Gofilex or Qubewire?)
Ahhh thanks for the reply! Makes sense! We also use Aspera here at work (videogames) but dont move that ammount, not even close.
I’ve done a 1PB sync between a pair of 8-node SAN clusters as one was being physically moved since it’d be faster to seed the data and start a delta sync rather than try to do it all over a 10Gb pipe. M
I’m in the same boat, just under 3PiB
It was something around 40 TB X2 . We were doing a terrain analysis of the entire Earth. Every morning for 25 days I would install two fresh drives in the cluster doing the data crunching and migrate the filled drives to our file server rack.
The drives were about 80% full and our primary server was mirrored to two other 50 drive servers. At the end of the month the two servers were then shipped to customer locations.
I once deleted an 800 gb log file, does that count
Depends, did you send it to the trash can first?
Nah, rm’d on shudders Oracle linux
I once abused an SMTP relay (my own) by emailing Novell a 400+ MB memory dump. Their FTP site kept timing out.
After all that, and them swearing they had to have it, the OS team said “Nope, we’re not going to look at it”. Guess how I feel about Novell after that?
This was in the mid-90’s.
Well, at least they were being on-brand. 😅
I’ve migrated petabytes from one GPFS file system to another. More than once, in fact. I’ve also migrated about 600TB of data from D3 tape format to 9940.
In the middle of something 200tb for my Plex server going from a 12 bay system to a 36 LFF system. But I’ve also literally driven servers across the desert because it was faster than trying to move data from one datacenter to another.
Just thinking about how much data you could transfer using this. MicroSD cards makes it a decent amount. Latency would be horrible, but throughput could be pretty good I think.
Packet loss would be quite costly though
Amazon Snowball will send you a semi truck.
Which desert? I’ve lived in the desert my entire life.
From LA to Vegas. Took the servers down end of business one night, drove it all night, installed it and got it back online before start of business the next day.
As an ex-Vegas resident, I have to ask: why were you moving stuff to Vegas?
It’s got a hell of a datacenter.
I don’t remember how many files, but typically these geophysical recordings clock in at 10-30 GB. What I do remember, though, was the total transfer size: 4TB. It was kind of like a bunch of .segd, and they were stored in this server cluster that was mounted in a shipping container for easy transport and lifting onboard survey ships. Some geophysics processors needed it on the other side of the world. There were nobody physically heading in the same direction as the transfer, so we figured it would just be easier to rsync it over 4G. It took a little over a week to transfer.
Normally when we have transfers of a substantial size going far, we ship it on LTO. For short distance transfers we usually run a fiber, and I have no idea how big the largest transfer job has been that way. Must be in the hundreds of TB. The entire cluster is 1.2PB, bit I can’t recall ever having to transfer everything in one go, as the receiving end usually has a lot less space.
4G?! That strikes fear into my heart!
The alternative was 5mbit/s VSAT. 4G was a luxury at that time.
At the rates I’m paying for 4G data, there are very few places in the world where it wouldn’t be cheaper for me to get on a plane and sneakernet that much data
a .png of your mom’s width
A few years back I worked at a home. They organised the whole data structure but needed to move to another Providor. I and my colleagues moved roughly just about 15.4 TB. I don’t know how long it took because honestly we didn’t have much to do when the data was moving so we just used the downtime for some nerd time. Nerd time in the sense that we just started gaming and doing a mini LAN party with our Raspberry and banana pi’s.
Surprisingly the data contained information of lots of long dead people which is quiet scary because it wasn’t being deleted.
No idea about which specific type of business it is, but keeping that history long term can have some benefits, especially to outside people. Some government agencies require companies to keep records for a certain number of years. It could also help out in legal investigations many years in the future and show any auditors you keep good records. From a historical perspective, it can be matched to census, birth, and death certificates. A lot of generational history gets lost.
Companies also just hoard data. Never know what will be useful later. shrug
