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):
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
@jgoerzen
Hi.
I don't understand your workflow there ?
@lienrag So I have a machine - actually an old laptop with all radios disabled - that is airgapped. I can use nncp-file to send data to and from it. It uses a USB stick or micro SD card as the transport medium. I plug it into my desktop machine, which ingests the packets and forwards them on towards the destination or processes locally, as appropriate. It also sends back ACKs. This is also the process of adding data do it. Usually when I need something, I just view it on that machine.
Oh, thanks.
Actually I didn't know what nncp was.
Seems quite promising indeed.
Are there specific measures to check in order for this workflow to be secure ?
@ckeen @lienrag Here are some pages with ideas for #NNCP:
First, my ideas for NNCP projects page here: https://www.complete.org/ideas-for-nncp-projects/
Then, Sergey (NNCP author) has some ideas here:
https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/Integration.html
https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/Use-cases.html
Over at
https://www.complete.org/nncp/ there are also some more articles that may give ideas.