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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. Re:Theft waiting to happen by hawguy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:Theft waiting to happen by CSMoran · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  3. Not gonna happen by garryknight · · Score: 5, Funny

    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