this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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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.

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[–] Davel23@fedia.io 82 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Not that big by today's standards, but I once downloaded the Windows 98 beta CD from a friend over dialup, 33.6k at best. Took about a week as I recall.

[–] pete_the_cat@lemmy.world 30 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I remember downloading the scene on American Pie where Shannon Elizabeth strips naked over our 33.6 link and it took like an hour, at an amazing resolution of like 240p for a two minute clip 😂

[–] fahfahfahfah@lemmy.billiam.net 12 points 3 months ago

And then you busted after 15 seconds?

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[–] absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz 17 points 3 months ago

Yep, downloaded XP over 33.6k modem, but I'm in NZ so 33.6 was more advertising than reality, it took weeks.

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[–] Urist@lemmy.ml 59 points 3 months ago

I obviously downloaded a car after seeing that obnoxious anti-piracy ad.

[–] freijon@lemmings.world 55 points 3 months ago (7 children)

I'm currently backing up my /dev folder to my unlimited cloud storage. The backup of the file /dev/random is running since two weeks.

[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 10 points 3 months ago

That's silly. You should compress it before uploading.

[–] Mike1576218@lemmy.ml 9 points 3 months ago

No wonder. That file is super slow to transfer for some reason. but wait till you get to /dev/urandom. That file hat TBs to transfer at whatever pipe you can throw at it...

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[–] Neuromancer49@midwest.social 46 points 3 months ago (1 children)

In grad school I worked with MRI data (hence the username). I had to upload ~500GB to our supercomputing cluster. Somewhere around 100,000 MRI images, and wrote 20 or so different machine learning algorithms to process them. All said and done, I ended up with about 2.5TB on the supercomputer. About 500MB ended up being useful and made it into my thesis.

Don't stay in school, kids.

[–] mEEGal@lemmy.world 18 points 3 months ago (2 children)

You should have said no to math, it's a helluva drug

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[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 42 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Entire drive/array backups will probably be by far the largest file transfer anyone ever does. The biggest I've done was a measly 20TB over the internet which took forever.

Outside of that the largest "file" I've copied was just over 1TB which was a SQL file backup for our main databases at work.

[–] cbarrick@lemmy.world 9 points 3 months ago

+1

From an order of magnitude perspective, the max is terabytes. No "normal" users are dealing with petabytes. And if you are dealing with petabytes, you're not using some random poster's program from reddit.

For a concrete cap, I'd say 256 tebibytes...

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[–] Taleya@aussie.zone 34 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I work in cinema content so hysterical laughter

[–] potajito@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] Taleya@aussie.zone 23 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (5 children)

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

[–] Azzk1kr@feddit.nl 11 points 3 months ago (4 children)
[–] Dlayknee@lemmy.world 11 points 3 months ago

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

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[–] MoonMelon@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 months ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] ramble81@lemm.ee 32 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I’ve done a 1PB sync between a pair of 8-node SAN clusters as one was being physically moved since it’d be faster to seed the data and start a delta sync rather than try to do it all over a 10Gb pipe. M

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 10 points 3 months ago

I'm in the same boat, just under 3PiB

[–] Hugin@lemmy.world 24 points 3 months ago

It was something around 40 TB X2 . We were doing a terrain analysis of the entire Earth. Every morning for 25 days I would install two fresh drives in the cluster doing the data crunching and migrate the filled drives to our file server rack.

The drives were about 80% full and our primary server was mirrored to two other 50 drive servers. At the end of the month the two servers were then shipped to customer locations.

[–] pixeltree@lemmy.blahaj.zone 20 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I once deleted an 800 gb log file, does that count

[–] Loulou@lemmy.mindoki.com 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Depends, did you send it to the trash can first?

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[–] d00phy@lemmy.world 18 points 3 months ago

I’ve migrated petabytes from one GPFS file system to another. More than once, in fact. I’ve also migrated about 600TB of data from D3 tape format to 9940.

[–] Trigger2_2000@sh.itjust.works 18 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I once abused an SMTP relay (my own) by emailing Novell a 400+ MB memory dump. Their FTP site kept timing out.

After all that, and them swearing they had to have it, the OS team said "Nope, we're not going to look at it". Guess how I feel about Novell after that?

This was in the mid-90's.

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[–] brygphilomena@lemmy.world 17 points 3 months ago (5 children)

In the middle of something 200tb for my Plex server going from a 12 bay system to a 36 LFF system. But I've also literally driven servers across the desert because it was faster than trying to move data from one datacenter to another.

[–] Dlayknee@lemmy.world 8 points 3 months ago (3 children)

That's some RFC 2549 logic, right there.

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[–] neidu2@feddit.nl 15 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

I don't remember how many files, but typically these geophysical recordings clock in at 10-30 GB. What I do remember, though, was the total transfer size: 4TB. It was kind of like a bunch of .segd, and they were stored in this server cluster that was mounted in a shipping container for easy transport and lifting onboard survey ships. Some geophysics processors needed it on the other side of the world. There were nobody physically heading in the same direction as the transfer, so we figured it would just be easier to rsync it over 4G. It took a little over a week to transfer.

Normally when we have transfers of a substantial size going far, we ship it on LTO. For short distance transfers we usually run a fiber, and I have no idea how big the largest transfer job has been that way. Must be in the hundreds of TB. The entire cluster is 1.2PB, bit I can't recall ever having to transfer everything in one go, as the receiving end usually has a lot less space.

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[–] Larvitz@burningboard.net 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

@data1701d downloading forza horizon 5 on Steam with around 120gb is the largest web-download, I can remember. In LAN, I’ve migrated my old FreeBSD NAS to my new one, which was a roughly 35TB transfer over NFS.

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[–] Decency8401@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

A few years back I worked at a home. They organised the whole data structure but needed to move to another Providor. I and my colleagues moved roughly just about 15.4 TB. I don't know how long it took because honestly we didn't have much to do when the data was moving so we just used the downtime for some nerd time. Nerd time in the sense that we just started gaming and doing a mini LAN party with our Raspberry and banana pi's.

Surprisingly the data contained information of lots of long dead people which is quiet scary because it wasn't being deleted.

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[–] MerchantsOfMisery@lemmy.ml 11 points 3 months ago (2 children)

8 TB but I'm just a regular Joe with a penchant for piracy.

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[–] IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world 10 points 3 months ago

Back in the late 90’s I worked for an internet search company, long before Google was a thing. We would regularly physically drive a dozen SCSI drives from a RAID array between two datacenters about 20 miles apart.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (8 children)

~15TB over the internet via 30Mbps uplink without any special considerations. Syncthing handled any and all network and power interruptions. I did a few power cable pulls myself.

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[–] Magnolia_@lemmy.ca 9 points 3 months ago

a .png of your mom's width

[–] weker01@sh.itjust.works 8 points 3 months ago

I once moved ~5TB of research data over the internet. It took days and unfortunately it also turned out that the data was junk :/

[–] psmgx@lemmy.world 7 points 3 months ago

Currently pushing about 3-5 TB of images to AI/ML scanning per day. Max we've seen through the system is about 8 TB.

Individual file? Probably 660 GB of backups before a migration at a previous job.

[–] HappyTimeHarry@lemm.ee 7 points 3 months ago

I downloaded that 200gb leak from national public data the other day, maybe not the biggest total but certainly the largest single text file ive ever messed with

[–] Yeahboiiii@lemm.ee 7 points 3 months ago

Largest one I ever did was around 4.something TB. New off-site backup server at a friends place. Took me 4 months due to data limits and an upload speed that maxed out at 3MB/s.

[–] tedvdb@feddit.nl 7 points 3 months ago

Today I've migrated my data from my old zfs pool to a new bigger one, the rsync of 13.5TiB took roughly 18 hours. It's slow spinning disks storage so that's fine.

The second and third runs of the same rsync took like 5 seconds, blazing fast.

[–] JerkyChew@lemmy.one 7 points 3 months ago

My Chia crypto farm at its peak had about 1.5 PB of plots, each plot was I think about 100ish gigs? I'd plot them on a dedicated machine and then move them to storage for farming. I think I'd move around 10TB per night.

It was done with a combination of powershell and bash scripts on Windows, Linux, and the built in Windows Services for Linux.

[–] delirious_owl@discuss.online 7 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Upgraded a NAS for the office. It was reaching capacity, so we replaced it. Transfer was maybe 30 TB. Just used rsync. That local transfer was relatively fast. What took longer was for the NAS to replicate itself with its mirror located in a DC on the other side of the country.

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[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 7 points 3 months ago

I think 16 terabytes? Might have been twelve. I was consolidating a bunch of old drives and data into a nas for a friend. He just didn't have the time, between working and school and brought me all the hardware and said "go" lol.

[–] HarriPotero@lemmy.world 7 points 3 months ago

I worked at a niche factory some 20 years ago. We had a tape robot with 8 tapes at some 200GB each. It'd do a full backup of everyone's home directories and mailboxes every week, and incremental backups nightly.

We'd keep the weekly backups on-site in a safe. Once a month I'd do a run to another plant one town over with a full backup.

I guess at most we'd need five tapes. If they still use it, and with modern tapes, it should scale nicely. Today's LTO-tapes are 18TB. Driving five tapes half an hour would give a nice bandwidth of 50GB/s. The bottleneck would be the write speed to tape at 400MB/s.

[–] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 7 points 3 months ago

I'll let you know... If it finishes.

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 7 points 3 months ago

We have DBs in the dozens of TB at work so probably one of them

[–] Llituro@hexbear.net 6 points 3 months ago

i've transferred 10's of ~300 GB files via manual rsyncs. it was a lot of binary astrophysical data, most of which was noise. eventually this was replaced by an automated service that bypassed local firewalls with internet-based transfers and aws stuff.

[–] hperrin@lemmy.world 6 points 3 months ago

I transferred my entire NAS storage, which includes all of my backups, cloud files, my family’s backups, and my… Linux ISOs. That was about 12TB.

[–] narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee 6 points 3 months ago

Around 15 TB migrating to a new NAS.

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