Uploading 100 terabytes of data to the cloud is extremely time consuming, expensive, and uses a hell of a lot of bandwidth.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) believes that lots of people would like to use its cloud storage services, but understands that many of them balk at the time and expense that goes with uploading huge amounts of data. To remedy that problem, AWS came up with the novel idea of shipping a high-capacity server out to companies, having them upload the data to it, before trucking it back to the nearest data center facility as a way of saving time and money.

That service, called Snowball, was introduced last year. Now, AWS has said it’s offering that very service to companies in reverse. So if a customer has lots of data stored in AWS’ cloud, and wants to move it somewhere else, Amazon will upload it to one of its Snowballs and ship it out the old fashioned way.

That way actually saves a lot of time. According to Amazon’s educated guesstimates, it takes the average customer more than 100 days to transfer 100TB of data across a typical Wide Area Network (WAN). In contrast it takes less than a day to upload or download the same amount of data to or from one of its Snowball servers, each of which can store a max. of 50TB of data. Which means that even if a customer quite literally ships out their data (in a container, across oceans), it would still arrive a lot faster than by doing things the modern way round.

Amazon also claims its Snowball servers are super secure too. Not only are they housed in a rugged container, with all the necessary cables, but the data is encrypted using encryption keys provided by the customers themselves. Those keys aren’t stored on the Snowball, so there’s no way Amazon or anyone else can hack them.

To take advantage of Snowball your data must be stored on Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service. The service is priced at $200 per Snowball, with an additional cost of $0.03 per GB of data transferred out of AWS. The company also insists the Snowball must be returned within 10 days, with customers being charged an additional $15 a day after that. Customers are also required to cover the shipping costs.

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