Not many of us have 50TB of data that we want to back up. But the creative amongst us who shoot lots of footage or want to backup all their 50,000 RAWs from a timelapse project now have a fast and easy option to do so.
Amazon’s new service is called Snowball and it is a small suitcase that has the sex appeal of a safe. But a safe that can hold 50 Terabytes.
Amazon clearly shares the advantage of using the new service over the previous data seeding procedure:
The original AWS Import/Export model was built around devices that you had to specify, purchase, maintain, format, package, ship, and track
This means that you could still snailmail huge amounts of data to Amazon’s servers if your needs exidded your bandwidth, but while possible, it was not optimal. the new Snowball service comes to fix that:
The new Snowball appliance is purpose-built for efficient data storage and transfer. It is rugged enough to withstand a 6 G jolt, and (at 50 lbs) light enough for one person to carry. It is entirely self-contained, with 110 Volt power and a 10 GB network connection on the back and an E Ink display/control panel on the front. It is weather-resistant and serves as its own shipping container; it can go from your mail room to your data center and back again with no packing or unpacking hassle to slow things down. In addition to being physically rugged and tamper-resistant, AWS Snowball detects tampering attempts
A one time usage of the Snowball service will cost you $200 + whatever shipping charges that apply. But look at the specs above, it is practically a black box without a plane. Data that is sent is encrypted and the case itself is tamper proof. It is weather proof, jolt proof and fall proof.
Lastly, you can monitor the state of a transfer from shipping to digestion in the cloud. Either on an app, or via an attached kindle that creates its own shiping label.
[Amazon Snowball via nofilmschool]
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