BBC News has an article on how Google is helping researchers in different parts of the world share terabytes of data by actually sending them hard-drives and then shipping them over to the destination.
“We have a number of machines about the size of brick blocks, filled with hard drives.
“We send them out to people who copy the data on them and ship them back to us. We dump them on to one of our data systems and ship it out to people.”
Google keeps a copy and the data is always in an open format, or in the public domain or perhaps covered by a creative commons license.
As Andrew Tanenbaum once said:
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
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