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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.)
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.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
Encrypt it?
Why would you store valuable data in plain text on a cloud service?
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.
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.
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
I can't understand [...]
And that should be your cue not to post, and think for a moment. If you have sensitive data, you use encryption.
Every end has half a stick.
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!
Unless they really screw up the encryption(in which case the value of some of the data being transported might be worthwhile); these things seem like they'd actually be pretty dubious theft options. Even new, 50TB worth of consumer grade disk(I assume that Amazon is using some redundancy; but probably isn't splurging on SAS or fancy-enterprise-SATA for disks that will spend most of their life with Fedex, not actually spinning) isn't actually all that valuable(4TB drives are ~$150 retail, 6TB ~$250) and 'used' is not a happy word when trying to sell a hard drive. Plus it's essentially certain that Amazon has every serial number, MAC address, etc. of every component in the box on record, so you are SOL if anyone ever checks.
It also wouldn't be too surprising if the case has some level of active anti-theft reporting. Given that sub-$100 cellphones have GPS, a cell modem, one or more accelerometers, and are built on SoCs with enough GPIO to connect a bunch of tamper switches/sensors to; it wouldn't be particularly impractical for the box to report its location, integrity, orientation, and vibration levels every 30 seconds for the entire trip. Not impossible to defeat; but you'd need to nab it in an area of no service and silence it(by force or RF-blocking container) before moving it elsewhere.
I'd certainly encrypt my data carefully before consigning it to either the post or the internet; but I'd be surprised if hitting these boxes would be a good risk/reward for postal employees(though I know I'd like a look at what is inside, a nice rugged network attached storage module is likely to be a neat piece of gear).
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.
M-I-Z
kU still sucks!
If you have 50TB of data that you'd like to put on the S3 cloud, Amazon is releasing Snowball.
I don't, therefore it isn't.
Garry Knight
Stop raining on everyone's parade! It's obviously an NSA operation, the software only works with Windows ME or Vista, and every time someone uses it an "SJW" is born.
Chrisq? Is that you?
I just had Amazon sneakernet some movies to me. Instead of suffer that tedious streaming download I had them put the data on optical disks and mail them to me. When they get here I'll rip them to my hard drive and be all set! That's customer service you just can't get from Hulu. I expect this sort of download to really take off over the next few years.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.