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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.

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).

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!

Uses for #sneakernet 8/ I love "fusion" approaches also. With #NNCP, I can transfer data opportunistically: via LAN if that's available, Internet (perhaps with #Yggdrasil) 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 #sneakernet 9/ #git works over sneakernet. My gitsync-nncp software (doesn't require NNCP) will asynchronously sync git trees https://salsa.debian.org/jgoerzen/gitsync-nncp . 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.

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

Uses for #sneakernet 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/

@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.

@jgoerzen

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 ?

@lienrag #NNCP has built-in end-to-end encryption and authentication, so it should be pretty safe already. But, you can always wrap stuff in gog or something if you want another layer of security.

@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.

@joeyh Interest piqued! I thought of SD cards because, even in protective holders, would be really flat. I don't know if quite flat enough to avoid the "thick mailpiece" surcharge, but I imagine a person could come up with various protective-enough and thin-enough things. Curious about how you envisioned that going! always closed, USB ports on the side or something?

@jgoerzen I've mailed thin USB keys in envelopes, and they were fine with regular postage.. even international (10+ countries)

I used cardboard inserts with a gap for the key.

I have somewhere a folding envelope prototype, the idea was it unfolded to plug in the key, and there were two configurations that exposed either of two sets of addresses, to bounce it between 2 people. just add a stamp each time..

@joeyh Oh very nice! Would those be ones with sort of a "half connector" like this https://support.yubico.com/hc/article_attachments/360011813840/YubiKey-NEO-1000.png ? Or maybe there are really thin USB-C variants these days.

@jgoerzen yes, very much like that