I suppose it mostly depends on how much the saved time is worth and how that compares to the cost of transport. I suppose there are some cases where shipping

I suppose it mostly depends on how much the saved time is worth and how that compares to the cost of transport. I suppose there are some cases where shipping a box of drives makes sense. I think a much more common case is having a critical machine crash and needing a backup sent to you. Depending on the bandwidth you actually have, restore by mail can be faster. And that's why companies like backblaze offer it. https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/features/restore https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/features/restore Restoring 8TB, which is not an unreasonable amount of data in 2023, at 40Mb/s, which is not that uncommon in much of America, still takes more than 2 days when everything goes perfectly. FedEx'ing a 8TB drive should be able to beat that in many cases.