> And yet there's still no sane way to move data from my laptop to my desktop without physical media. If the laptop and desktop are connected to a network, the

> And yet there's still no sane way to move data from my laptop to my desktop without physical media. If the laptop and desktop are connected to a network, then there's no reason to use physical media, in fact the medium can only be an additional failure mode. Try this instead: $ rsync -av (source path) (destination machine name):(destination path) On your LAN, use Zeroconf (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-configuration_networking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-configuration_networking) to resolve local machine names to IPs. > As long as it is easier to send the data round trip to a datacentre in Kansas and back than it is to send it within my own lan ... Yes, but the premise isn't correct, and it only adds to the list of possible failure modes.