Baslinux mailing list

["Anthony Albert" <albert AT polaris.umpi.maine.edu>]

On 14 Jan 2005 at 15:43, sindi keesan wrote:
>Is someone really crazy enough to modem 100MB?  That was an odd example to 
>pick.  It would be quicker to use floppy disks.  Or an old laptop computer 
>with file transfer cable.

I have... or at least files of similar sizes, ~80MB   With a 33.6Kb 
modem speed, you can get about 10MB per hour, and if you're willing to 
do pieces of the transfer now, and more pieces later, until you get all 
of the pieces, it's quite do-able.

Floppy disks is not necessarily faster, and is a lot less reliable, in 
my experience. By the time you format the floppies or make sure the 
files on them have been deleted, then do the copies, then make more 
copies after you get to the destination and find that two out of the 
set of floppies don't work, then have to return to start and make more 
floppies - you've used up more effort than using the modem. If you've 
got a server you can dial in to, then start downloading a list of 
pieces... you can set up the first dozen pieces to download, then walk 
away and just let the download continue.

Using an old laptop computer is a possibility, and I've done similar, 
too, using an external hard drive that could be interfaced to the 
parallel port.

Setting up the file transfer after dialing in can be pretty simple, and 
as noted, using split, you can simply reassemble the pieces once you've 
got them and checked their lengths.  Split makes it easy, since they 
should all be the same length but the last piece, and any that aren't 
the right length, you know you need to download again.

Nowadays, however, burning a CD-ROM is much more reliable and quicker 
as well, so I haven't done modem transfers larger than about 15MB in 
several years.

Anthony Albert
===========================================================
Anthony J. Albert                     albert AT umpi.maine.edu
Systems and Software Support Specialist          Postmaster
Computer Services - University of Maine, Presque Isle
        "This is only temporary, unless it works."
                        --- Red Green