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My company has offices in NY and LA, and we spend a lot of money FedExing hard drives back and forth.

Is there some service that would allow us to save money by uploading the files at either end over a fast connection? Like 100 Mbps or more?

We don't need a 'dedicated' connection; we'd like to pay by the hour or GB.

Most of the files are 100-200 gigabytes.

FIOS would do the job; unfortunately, it's not available at either location.

Thanks!

UPDATE: Seems like I'm not making the problem clear -- we're not looking for a software solution; the bottleneck is our physical internet connections which max out at around 5mbps upstream.

We need some facility that will allow us to 'rent/lease' a high-speed (50 Mbps+) internet connection.

Sorry, maybe this is the wrong place to ask.

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    Hire interns with access to major university computer labs at each end... – Spiff Feb 22 '12 at 23:29
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    Frankly, I suspect it's cheaper to just post the drives. This is sort of the cost of doing business on opposite coasts (and is a reason small companies usually DON'T do business on opposite coasts) – Shinrai Feb 22 '12 at 23:41
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    we spend a lot of money FedExing hard drives back and forth. Reminds me of the old truism, "Don't underestimate the bandwidth of a UPS Truck." It often is the easiest way of moving huge amounts of traffic. Big pipes = Cubic Dollars. Renting/Leasing off site high speed still means you've got to get it there. – Fiasco Labs Feb 22 '12 at 23:42
  • how would you get the data to your facility? – Journeyman Geek♦ Feb 23 '12 at 0:38
  • Is there any repetion of what you are transferring, it is it a new unique 100-200 Gb every time? Why is the peak rate so important that you want max transfer for only a little time each day? Some telcos may be able to provide a burst mode agreement – barrymac Feb 23 '12 at 1:07
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I can recommend bittorent for this. If you upload your files to a tracker you can adjust download speed by adding more uploaders.

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  • Not a solution ... the bottleneck is our upload connection speed. – Dan Feb 22 '12 at 23:36
  • @Dan: You can compress it before you share it with bittorrent. – Gigamegs Feb 22 '12 at 23:59
  • These are video files, already compressed. – Dan Feb 23 '12 at 0:53
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To get a 100Mbps connection speed you need to talk to your ISP. I have AT&T and I currently have a 50Mbps line burstable to 100Mbps. So we can scale UP when we need to. This didn't come free, and we certainly had to talk to our AT&T rep to get this prepared ahead of time. The time it took AT&T to implement this was about 2-3weeks. Otherwise you can do what google does. Overnight Fedex external hard drive.

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100-200MB shouldn't take very long to upload. I'd say at the very most, it wouldn't take more than a few hours, and that's much much faster than waiting for a physical thing to be shipped.

You could use a free service like http://www.dropbox.com/ or http://skydrive.live.com/

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  • 100-200 GIGAbytes, not MB. Problem is not software, it's hardware. – Dan Feb 22 '12 at 23:36
  • Ah, makes a hell of a lot more sense lol. – JacobTheDev Feb 22 '12 at 23:39
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I would install rsync and run it almost continuously. 100GB takes 10000 seconds on 100Mbit i.e 3 hours - faster and cheaper than fedex

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    We do NOT HAVE 100mbps; more like 5! That's the point, where can I go to 'rent' a 100mbps connection? – Dan Feb 22 '12 at 23:35
  • Go buy it? Why you said you can have it? At one fedex shipping you can have T1 for a month or so... – ZaB Feb 22 '12 at 23:47

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