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.
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.
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 😂
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.
/dev/random and other “files” in /dev are not really files, they are interfaces which van be used to interact with virtual or hardware devices. /dev/random spits out cryptographically secure random data. Another example is /dev/zero, which spits out only zero bytes.
Both are infinite.
Not all “files” in /dev are infinite, for example hard drives can (depending on which technology they use) be accessed under /dev/sda /dev/sdb and so on.
I obviously downloaded a car after seeing that obnoxious anti-piracy ad.
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.
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.
