Linux

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.

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

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.

I did 100TB, 100 streams of 1TB, all simultaneous with rsync

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

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

I once robocopied 16tb of media

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

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.

Rsynced 4.2TB of data from one server to another but with multiple files

I'm currently in the process of transferring about 50 TB from one zpool to another (locally), so I can destroy and recreate it.

I've downloaded a few torrents that were around 5 TB each, they're PS4 and Xbox 360 game collections.

Today I've migrated my data from my old zfs pool to a new bigger one, the rsync of 13.5TiB took roughly 18 hours. It's slow spinning disks storage so that's fine.

The second and third runs of the same rsync took like 5 seconds, blazing fast.

Local file transfer?

I cloned a 1TB+ system a couple of times.

As the Anaconda installer of Fedora Atomic is broken (yes, ironic) I have one system originally meant for tweaking as my "zygote" and just clone, resize, balance and rebase that for new systems.

Remote? 10GB MicroWin 11 LTSC IOT ISO, the least garbage that OS can get.

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.

I routinely do 1-4TB images of SSDs before making major changes to the disk. Run fstrim on all partitions and pipe dd output through zstd before writing to disk and they shrink to actually used size or a bit smaller. Largest ever backup was probably ~20T cloned from one array to another over 40/56GbE, the deltas after that were tiny by comparison.

You should ping CERN or Fermilab about this. Or maybe the Event Horizon Telescope team but I think they used sneakernet to image the M87 black hole.

Anyway, my answer is probably just a SQL backup like everyone else.

Around 15 TB migrating to a new NAS.

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.

As a single file? Likely 20GB iso.
As a collective job, 3TB of videos between hard drives for Jellyfin.

i've transferred 10's of ~300 GB files via manual rsyncs. it was a lot of binary astrophysical data, most of which was noise. eventually this was replaced by an automated service that bypassed local firewalls with internet-based transfers and aws stuff.

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 mean dd claims they can handle a quettabyte but how can we but sure.

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.

~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.

We have DBs in the dozens of TB at work so probably one of them

I don't remember how many files, but typically these geophysical recordings clock in at 10-30 GB. What I do remember, though, was the total transfer size: 4TB. It was kind of like a bunch of .segd, and they were stored in this server cluster that was mounted in a shipping container for easy transport and lifting onboard survey ships. Some geophysics processors needed it on the other side of the world. There were nobody physically heading in the same direction as the transfer, so we figured it would just be easier to rsync it over 4G. It took a little over a week to transfer.

Normally when we have transfers of a substantial size going far, we ship it on LTO. For short distance transfers we usually run a fiber, and I have no idea how big the largest transfer job has been that way. Must be in the hundreds of TB. The entire cluster is 1.2PB, bit I can't recall ever having to transfer everything in one go, as the receiving end usually has a lot less space.

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.

@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.