The largest file transfer I've ever had to do.

[draggar]

He had something for everyone!!

10-15 database files each over 250 MB
25,000 pictures in the MyPicutures folder (mostly JPG thank god)
Over 100,000 files in the MyDocuments - all under 25K
7 PSTs - all over 1.5GB

[protege]

Holy shit!

[rvdammit]

That's not large. Large is the entire Torchwood collection, in HD, to Microsoft for Xbox Live. It is in the order of Terrorbytes, I can't remember the exact number I was told, 400 does come to mind though.

[Jetfire]

Doesn't SneakerNet/FedExNet become faster at some point around those sizes? Wow.

[Crossbow]

With our clients, some of their production databases are too large to get on DVD. We've had some clients have to send us hard drives so we can pull their database in for support. The *average* db backup request I deal with is about 5-7 gb. Largest was about 85gb, zipped. That restore took all weekend.

[Geek King]

One of the military branches we dealt with when I was a newbie tester had a stock control database that sat on a heavily modified UNIX box with several dozen terrabytes of data--and this was ten years ago. There was no talk about transferring when there was an issue, the database group at the workplace had to be cleared for Top Secret security clearance to even look at the live data. Data cleanups involved some interesting red tape, let me tell you. I got to meet a three-star general, though.

[rvdammit]

Doesn't SneakerNet/FedExNet become faster at some point around those sizes? Wow.

Yep. But MS will not receive data that way.

[trunks2k]

That's nothing. Back in the day of being a system test intern, I was running update tests on one of our applications. This meant I had to copy all the database files to a different computer due to the size of it (long story). The size of all the files put together? Over 40GB. Not only that, I had to transfer the files through a router that would randomly decide to not run at full duplex, which meant it would take over 12 hours to transfer everything over.

On top of that, the actual software upgrade itself would take - not 12 hours, not 24 hours, but over 48 hours to complete on that particular data set. So that meant I had to run it over the weekend. You could hear my screams a mile away when on a Sunday morning I saw that my terminal session had crashed in the middle of the night and killed the update process, which meant I'd have to start from square one.

[wolfie]

Doesn't SneakerNet/FedExNet become faster at some point around those sizes? Wow.

Definitely - one of the maxims of IT is "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes".