// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Transfer files over an Ethernet patch cable
It's possible to just connect two computers together with Ethernet and do a bit of IP configuration:
These commands assume you are using Linux, but this trick works everywhere.
A nothing-special patch cable and ethernet jack should have no problem hitting ~900 Mbits/second, which is 6.7 GB per minute.
Fancy network cards will allow speeds orders of magnitude faster, but it's already much faster than USB flash or cloud storage.
... for transferring a file larger than 10 GB or so between two machines a few meters apart.
Cloud storage: upload it to a server and download it from the other machine.
In most cases, this will be glacially slow, both because of slow internet connections and cloud providers throttling traffic.
Worse, the file has to be transferred over the network twice which doubles the time it takes.
Also, it can be expensive unless you already have a suitable server.
Direct TCP over LAN is better, but WiFi is still quite slow and with random dropouts:
those multi-gigabit speed claims are dubious at best and certainly won't be reached in a typical home networking environment (walls, interference, long distances, etc)
However, if your house is wired for gigabit Ethernet, this can work great.
Removable storage is quite slow unless you are willing to spend a lot of money.