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I've been reflecting - would be more popular if it were easy? In my post at changelog.complete.org/archive 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):

The ChangelogDead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet“OK,” you’re probably thinking. “John, you talk a lot about things like Gopher and personal radios, and now you want to talk about building a reliable network out of……

Uses for 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 would detect SD as dupes - or if my laptop failed, read it in.

Uses for 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.

Uses for 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.

Uses for 5/ The project @kiwix is designed to make accessible . 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.

Uses for 6/ I got started with this by desiring an machine for sensitive things like tax records, 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).

Uses for 7/ I think that machines are desperately underused. We all understand their 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!

Uses for 8/ I love "fusion" approaches also. With , I can transfer data opportunistically: via LAN if that's available, Internet (perhaps with ) if not, and sneakernet otherwise. Likewise, if I copy packets to a SD card or something but a synchronous route later becomes available, NNCP will just remove what then becomes a duplicate on the SD card at ingest time.

It's really nice to be transport-agnostic to such a level.

Uses for 9/ works over sneakernet. My gitsync-nncp software (doesn't require NNCP) will asynchronously sync git trees salsa.debian.org/jgoerzen/gits . I use it to sync my org-mode and org-roam notes. Sometimes I use a machine only rarely (say, once a month). If it has Internet when I power it up, it'll download hundreds of missing updates in a second or two. Or if not, I can just copy the files queued to it over USB (and likewise with updates on it) and I'm good.

GitLabJohn Goerzen / gitsync-nncp · GitLabSync git repositories over NNCP or other asynchronous transport

Uses for 10/ git-annex by @joeyh is designed to help with moving data across sytems. There is an NNCP remote for git-annex here git.sr.ht/~ehmry/git-annex-rem . Combined with sneakernet, you can now manage very large collections of files that may be difficult to manage any other way.

git.sr.ht ~ehmry/git-annex-remote-nncp - NNCP special remote for git-annex - sourcehut git
John Goerzen

Uses for 11/ I hate to type "end" because inevitably I will realize in 10 minutes that I forgot some, but hopefully this is a useful set of ideas. end/