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   John Goerzen (jgoerzen@floss.social)'s status on Saturday, 03-Sep-2022 06:27:19 JST John Goerzen

   I've been reflecting - would #sneakernet be more popular if it were easy? In my post at https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10421-dead-usb-drives-are-fine-building-a-reliable-sneakernet I describe one way to make it easier: NNCP with reliable wrappers (so a dead USB drive or whatever doesn't mean data loss). Here are some scenarios where I think through situations it might be useful (a thread):

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     John Goerzen (jgoerzen@floss.social)'s status on Saturday, 03-Sep-2022 06:27:12 JST John Goerzen

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     Uses for #sneakernet 7/ I think that #airgapped machines are desperately underused. We all understand their #security benefits (I hope), but probably the reason we don't often use them is because they're so HARD to use.

     Thanks to apt-offline, I even keep my airgapped machine updated via sneakernet!

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     John Goerzen (jgoerzen@floss.social)'s status on Saturday, 03-Sep-2022 06:27:13 JST John Goerzen

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     Uses for #sneakernet 6/ I got started with this by desiring an #airgapped machine for sensitive things like tax records, #GnuPG signing, etc. If I was going to be using this often - say, daily or weekly - I didn't want to manually have to worry about "did this data successfully get there" all the time. I know how often USB drives fail. So, reliable sneakernet FTW. It works beautifully and can even send backups to my backup server (which is also sneakernet-capable).

     PublicLewdness repeated this.
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     John Goerzen (jgoerzen@floss.social)'s status on Saturday, 03-Sep-2022 06:27:14 JST John Goerzen

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     • Kiwix

     Uses for #sneakernet 5/ The #kiwix project @kiwix is designed to make #websites accessible #offline. If you have a need to see them offline, that implies a need to get the data to them somehow. Again the kiwix .zim files could be mailed to the recipients on SD cards.

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     John Goerzen (jgoerzen@floss.social)'s status on Saturday, 03-Sep-2022 06:27:16 JST John Goerzen

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     Uses for #sneakernet 4/ You can expand any of these ideas with "mail it to a friend" also. In the 1970s, long-distance phone calls were extremely expensive. So my relatives recorded "audio letters" on tape and mailed the tapes around. Sometimes a mailbox is more available than a fast Internet connection. You can always type up your emails and mail the (E2E encrypted, of course) SD to a friend. Friend loads, it relays over Internet to your box, is decrypted, and processed.

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     John Goerzen (jgoerzen@floss.social)'s status on Saturday, 03-Sep-2022 06:27:17 JST John Goerzen

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     Uses for #sneakernet 3/ There's the obvious "I've got 20TB to get to my friend across town." If your Internet connection is like mine, that would take 48 days to send. Might be able to drive it there in 30 minutes.

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     John Goerzen (jgoerzen@floss.social)'s status on Saturday, 03-Sep-2022 06:27:18 JST John Goerzen

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     Uses for #sneakernet 2/ When I travel, I take photos/videos and I want them to be backed up. If I'm in a hotel with decent wifi (never a guarantee!), I can just rsync or Syncthing it home. But what about visiting an island or other remote area? I could take along some micro SDs and copy backups to them. When I'm in town, mail it to myself for less than $1. When I get home, laptop can transmit over LAN and #NNCP would detect SD as dupes - or if my laptop failed, read it in.