Mail a Hard Drive To Amazon For AWS S3 Import/Export

Amazon has announced a new option for users of Amazon Web Services called AWS Import/Export. This new Import/Export option allows you to mail a hard drive to Amazon and either have the contents placed into a S3 bucket or the current contents of a bucket placed onto the hard drive. Another usage Amazon notes is when your customers are regularly sending you drives filled with data – now they can send the drives directly to Amazon.

Amazon explains that if the import or export is set to take a week using your Internet connection, the Import/Export option might be the answer. They continue, “If you have large amounts of data to load and an Internet connection with limited bandwidth, the time required to prepare and ship a portable storage device to AWS can be a small percentage of the time it would take to transfer your data over the internet.”

The cost is $80 per drive plus $2.49 per hour of data loading. Amazon will ship the drive back to you at their expense.

As a heavy user of S3 – this is an awesome option – especially for creating off-site backups. For a couple hundred dollars, you get an external drive with all of your data which you can store offsite. Since it’s a one time import or export, I guess the idea is that you hook up the new drive to the Internet for partial backups after the initial export is completed.