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Amazon To Offer Sneakernet Services: Data Upload By Mail

Posted by timothy on from the those-are-some-big-sneakers dept.

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.)

3 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. A perfect example of why tech is cyclical.... by Drakonblayde · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In the beginning, networking was developed so that folks wouldn't have to shuttle data back and forth via locomotion.

    Now, we have so much data and fast bandwidth is so expensive, that transferring data to another site physically is actually a consideration.

  2. And when you want to move your data out? by innocent_white_lamb · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Do they load the box and send it back to you when you're moving to another service or returning to self-hosting?

    --
    If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
  3. Re:It's been available for a while by danceswithtrees · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Even without the detour, what are the security ramifications of connecting a foreign device to your network? Its from Amazon, they have an image to protect, but what if they get hacked or the packaged gets switched/tampered with en route? The device can silently start making its way around your network collecting data you didn't want to upload.

    I'll take off my aluminum Faraday beanie cap now.