How to transfer data between continents?

Question

I want to transfer files from a server here in US to another one in China, and I wonder what's the best way to do it? Is there anything special needed to be considered compared to other file transfer (e.g. within a country)?

Also, does the optimal approach depend on the file size? Say, a 1 TB file vs. a 10 KB text file?

Thanks!

@lain, of course. But what I meant is whether the optimal approach would be different for different file sizes. — chaohuang, May 05 '14 at 15:47
FTPing a big file (say 1GB) will be faster than sending 1,000,000 x 1kB files. If it gets into 100's of GB, DHL is faster still. — xcxc, May 05 '14 at 16:20

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered May 05 '14 at 16:42

Depends on what you want to do.It's almost always faster to copy a single 10 gig file than 10 gig with 1000's of small files (because of connections etc) although you could speed up the small file size by using concurrent connections.

SFTP/SCP are good bets for general use. Rsync and Robocopy (windows only) are more specific tools.Torrents are a very efficient way to transmit large files to multiple systems as long as they all trust each other.

If you have a lot of files and are only updating some of them then a differential copy can be a lot more efficient.

How to transfer data between continents?

1 Answers1