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Mail Your Hard Drive to Amazon

We have written before about a little-known facet of AWS, the ability to ship your physical hard drive off to that Big Cloud in Seattle and have them make a copy of all your precious data and put it in their cloud.

Up until now, your data had to reside on an S3 raw storage account, which made it harder to incorporate into a machine image on AWS. That has changed as of today, and your contents can be imported to AWS’ Elastic Block Storage, which is a lot easier to manipulate in the AWS solar system. Once your drive is uploaded, you can create a volume based on the EBS snapshot and attach it to a VM, or share it with others.

The cost is reasonable: you pay $80 per drive, plus the time it takes them to make the copy. This avoids slow (or even reasonably fast) Internet connections, and Amazon will send you back their drive once they are done. A TB disk would cost about $120 as an example, and there is a pricing calculator so you can see what to expect.

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