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

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.

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.

I work in cinema content so hysterical laughter

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

@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.

~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.

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

Approximately 2 petabytes.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

4 TB over my home network. 800GB download from a external server.

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.

I synced to the BSV shitcoin which is 11+ terabytes. So large I had to turn on throwing away the rest of what I downloaded because it wouldn't fit on all of the storage media I own. I feel sorry for the people running an archive node.

When I was moving from a Windows NAS (God, fuck windows and its permissions management) on an old laptop to a Linux NAS I had to copy about 10TB from some drives to some other drives so I could re-format the drives as a Linux friendly format, then copy the data back to the original drives.

I was also doing all of this via terminal, so I had to learn how to copy in the background, then write a script to check and display the progress every few seconds. I'm shocked I didn't loose any data to be completely honest. Doing shit like that makes me marvel at modern GUIs.

Took about 3 days in copying files alone. When combined with all the other NAS setup stuff, ended up taking me about a week just in waiting for stuff to happen.

I cannot reiterate enough how fucking difficult it was to set up the Windows NAS vs the Ubuntu Server NAS. I had constant issues with permissions on the Windows NAS. I've had about 1 issue in 4 months on the Linux NAS, and it was much more easily solved.

The reason the laptop wasn't a Linux NAS is due to my existing Plex server instance. It's always been on Windows and I haven't yet had a chance to try to migrate it to Linux. Some day I'll get around to it, but if it ain't broke... Now the laptop is just a dedicated Plex server and serves files from the NAS instead of local. It has much better hardware than my NAS, otherwise the NAS would be the Plex server.

Manually transferred about 7TBs to my new Rpi4 powered NAS. It took a couple of days because I was lazy and transferred 15 GBs at a time which slowed down the speed for some reason. It could handle small sub 1 GB files in half a minute otherwise.

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.

When I was in highschool we toured the local EPA office. They had the most data I've ever seen accessible in person. Im going to guess how much.

It was a dome with a robot arm that spun around and grabbed tapes. It was 2000 so I'm guessing 100gb per tape. But my memory on the shape of the tapes isn't good.

Looks like tapes were four inches tall. Let's found up to six inches for housing and easier math. The dome was taller than me. Let's go with 14 shelves.

Let's guess a six foot shelf diameter. So, like 20 feet circumference. Tapes were maybe .8 inches a pop. With space between for robot fingers and stuff, let's guess 240 tapes per shelf.

That comes out to about 300 terabytes. Oh. That isn't that much these days. I mean, it's a lot. But these days you could easily get that in spinning disks. No robot arm seek time. But with modern hardware it'd be 60 petabytes.

I'm not sure how you'd transfer it these days. A truck, presumably. But you'd probably want to transfer a copy rather than disassemble it. That sounds slow too.