Well...two decades ago, 500 GB of data would have been moved as freight, too. Data expands to fill any available capacity - I don't think there is any way around that.
About 9 years ago, while working as a system administration consultant, I had a gig to fly a portable hard drive with about 360 GB from LA to St. Louis as part of a migration of a web application. It was faster than the network connections available to my client at the time. I remember calculating the throughput...
I asked why don't you just FedEx it? It's too important, the client said, and we know and trust you.
It was funny, I had it in a laptop bag, and didn't let go of it except to go through the security scanner... the only thing missing was the handcuff connecting it to my wrist. :)
Well...you are probably not going to throw a hard drive at a client's door and run. A delivery guy might, as it's just another cardboard package, not priceless data (might be easier now with SSDs).
Indeed, getting a trustworthy courier service is so hard that actually sending an in-house employee is worthwhile, even though their hourly rates make this extremely expensive: you are removing tens of abstraction layers, while preserving high degree of control ("Oh, we might have run it over with a truck. And accidentally put it on a plane to New Zealand on hop #3. And they can't seem to find it there.")
