I have 350GB of data I have to upload to the servers where I work. Doing so from home using the VPN will take about 4 days (our VPN is strangely slow and IT hasn't been able to figure out why since they got it over a year ago). Getting in my Prime, driving to work (I have an essential employee letter so I'm legal), plugging in my car to charge, uploading the data locally using gigabit Ethernet (and without having to go through the VPN appliance) and driving back home will take under 2 hours. Prius Prime - faster than the speed of light. There's an expression I heard in college - "never underestimate the bandwidth of a pickup truck full of data." If you do the math, you'll be shocked at how high that bandwidth can be (try it - it's fun!). Maybe the expression should be updated to include other vehicles now that 2TB fits in a device the size of a stick of gum (I have a 2TB NVMe SSD storing this data). When I was in college (90s), mass-data-stores were on magnetic tape.
That’s why most cloud services will offer you the option to upload or download large amounts of data on a usb appliance via snail mail/messenger. Common practice no magic involved.
My Dad had that at work when I was in elementary and middle school. He once told me a story that a guy was walking down the stairs (sneaker net again) with a large box of Hollerith cards when he missed a step and dropped the box. It was faster to go back up and re-punch new ones that to organize the jumbled mess that resulted.
Yap, awkwardness of working from home via VPN. Downloading is OK, but uploading is sooo slow. I too drive in once a week or so to work to do database uploads.
When we sold the car we owned when we first got married, it was still blowing punch card chads out of the vents. That's because as we got in the car at the church as we left the wedding, a high school friend of my wife, who was a programmer, chucked a whole box (like one that would hold four 1-gallon bottles) of chads in on us. I'm thankful for good bandwidth, though, so I don't have to use Prius-Net.
