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.

  • Taleya
    361·
    2 months ago

    I work in cinema content so hysterical laughter

    • potajito
      140·
      2 months ago

      Interesting! Could you give some numbers? And what do you use to move the files? If you can disclose obvs

      • Taleya
        240·
        2 months ago2 months ago

        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

          • Dlayknee
            110·
            2 months ago

            Digital Cinema Package; basically the movie file you’re watching when you’re in a movie theater.

          • Taleya
            40·
            2 months ago

            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

        • MoonMelonEnglish
          60·
          2 months ago

          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.

          • CrabAndBroomEnglish
            40·
            2 months ago

            Oh yeah I worked in animation for a bit too. Those 4K master files are no joke lol

          • WldFyre
            40·
            2 months ago

            You legally have to tell us if that movie was Shrek.

            • MoonMelonEnglish
              30·
              2 months ago

              Hah, nope. Shrek was made in Glendale, so they probably had everything on site or right next door.

          • Taleya
            30·
            2 months ago

            Fucking hell the raws woulda been gigantic

        • potajito
          30·
          2 months ago

          Ahhh thanks for the reply! Makes sense! We also use Aspera here at work (videogames) but dont move that ammount, not even close.

        • daq
          30·
          2 months ago

          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.

          • Taleya
            10·
            2 months ago2 months ago

            Hahahah did you enjoy Australian Internet? It’s wonderfully archaic

            (MPS, Delux, Gofilex or Qubewire?)