As we all know, one issue with doing online backup is if you have a huge amount of data to upload or download, it can take a lonnnnnnnnng time to upload or download.
Amazon has a clever solution to take care of this problem for you. You can ship them a hard drive and have the data loaded into S3.
How it works is that you put your data on a compatible storage device, then you email them. They’ll email you back with a unique identifier that you put on the device. Once you get that, you ship the device off to them. They’ll load the data and ship it back.
This makes a lot of sense if you are someone who has a ton of data to upload for the first time, has to do extremely large backups, or has a DR situation and can’t wait days and days to download your backup.
How Much Does It Cost?
Obviously this is not free. Amazon charges $80 per device, and $2.49 per data loading hour.
Because of this cost, you obviously have to have a certain amount of data to make it worth it. To that end, Amazon has an Import/Export Calculator to compare the cost of using the service vs. just uploading it.
If you had a large amount of data would you use this? Do you think other online backup providers are going to start offering this? (If they don’t already).
