Physical media transfer

How it works

Encrypt the drive. Put the key or passphrase on a separate channel. Include a hash on paper or in a mail that does not travel in the same box. Chain of custody is the audit.

A 4 TB disk leaves Tuesday and arrives Thursday. The hash matches. A network copy would have taken most of a week on the site link. The drive is wiped after the copy lands in the bucket.

How it differs

This is still a file transfer. It is not a backup rotation.

An unencrypted drive in a truck is a lost control, not a clever shortcut.

Wipe or destroy the media after ingest.

On the ticket

• The practical close is a log line: time, actor, byte count, result.
• Without that line the transfer is a story.
• With it, the next person can see whether this door did what the ticket claimed.
• If the path is shared, say so in the partner profile so a later change does not silently pick a different limit, key, or region.
• On a real ticket, write down the door, the byte count, and the clock.
• For physical media transfer, that means naming the host or bucket, the expected size, and the time the other side must have a complete file.
• A progress bar is not that record.
• A 200 response that arrives before the complete call is not that record.
• If a retry is allowed, say how many and whether it resumes.
• If a person must approve the send, name the person.
• Partners who receive physical media transfer files should match on hash or size before they import.
• A same-length corrupt file passes a size check and fails a hash.
• Keep the published hash off the only channel an attacker can edit, or treat it as a corruption check rather than a substitution check.
• When the path changes, new key, new region, new cap, update the profile the same day so the next run does not use a stale limit.