I'm very small-time compared to many of you as all my data is on 12 HDDs ranging between 8 and 12 TB in size each. Most of it is ZFS, the rest is NTFS. But regardless of my small scale, I'm faced with the prospect of needing to relocate to another country that I can't drive to, so my hardware will have to leave my custody to be shipped.
I may not have a lot of notice about the move, so I might not have a lot of time to prep for the move.
I want to ask what you would do or perhaps have actually done to make this a successful and relatively stress-free move.
My current "vision" is simply to buy several large USB drives, encrypt them and make multiple full copies of the entire data set. I might mail some to my new address overseas and hand-carry some as I personally make my way overseas, while the original hardware travels on a container ship with all my stuff. I would probably remove all the HDDs from their chassis and package them individually and separately from the computer hardware. I can put this together within a few days.
In theory I could just pack all the HDDs in a carry-on, but space and weight then become an issue. It would worry me to carry everything with me like that, but it's possible (I've actually done it for a similar overseas move many years ago, but I had only four HDDs then, it was more manageable).
I've thought about using something like S3 or rsync dot net or whatever for an additional safety layer but my Internet isn't fast enough for that to be feasible due to the size of the data, and I don't currently have any off-site backups.