Amazon To Offer Sneakernet Services: Data Upload By Mail

blueshift_1 writes: If you have 50TB of data that you'd like to put on the S3 cloud, Amazon is releasing Snowball. It's basically a large grey box full of hard drives that Amazon will mail to you. Simply upload your files and mail it back — they will upload it for you. For $200 + shipping, it's at a pretty reasonable price point if you're tired of hosting your data and want to try and push that to AWS. ("Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." -Tanenbaum, Andrew S.)

Comments

It's been available for a while

[Pete (big-pete)]

It's nice they've got an official box and all, but the service to send disks to Amazon has been there for a while (as a beta program).

Here is a blog post from 2009 explaining the service.

Of course, a nice official controlled and encrytped box is a far tidier way of doing things!

-- Pete.

Re:Theft waiting to happen

[hawguy]

The boxes in which these hard drives ship will be obvious that they're from Amazon. It's an invitation to thieves to steal the boxes and the data on the hard drives. I can't understand why ANYONE would ship data of any value in this manner.

The data is encrypted by the tool that copies data to the device. It doesn't seem like it would take too many thefts before UPS/FedEx roots out their thieving employees.

Re:Theft waiting to happen

[Drakonblayde]

And yes, excerpted directly from the service web page found at https://aws.amazon.com/importe...

'Once it arrives, attach the appliance to your local network, download and run the Snowball client to establish a connection, and then use the client to select the file directories that you want to transfer to the appliance. The client will then encrypt and transfer the files to the appliance at high speed.'

So unless the client is absolute crap, it's a pretty good solution

Re:And when you want to move your data out?

[Drakonblayde]

Yeah, it's 200 bucks + 3 cents a gig if you want them to ship the data to you, which isn't terribly unreasonable

Re:Theft waiting to happen

[Rainbow Nerds]

There are versions for Windows, OS X, and Linux. Amazon supports the Snowball Client for Ubuntu 12+ and RHEL 6+, but no doubt it can run on other systems. https://aws.amazon.com/importexport/tools/

Also, as per this link, they're working on chain-of-custody tracking using GPS. Amazon has already considered the possibility of theft and it doesn't seem likely to be an issue.