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.

  • fuckwit_mcbumcrumbleEnglish
    420·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • cbarrickEnglish
      90·
      2 months ago

      +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…