

Offline Disk Import for Google Cloud Storage - ship your HDDs to Google - rasterizer
https://developers.google.com/storage/docs/early-access

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octo_t
For me to upload 3TB on my shoddy connection would take about 290 days or so.
If I ever needed to put that much data in the cloud, you can bet I'd use
something like this.

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Sami_Lehtinen
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a jumbo jet full of magnetic tape.

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bane
even worse latency/bandwidth payoffs:

1) a hundred car locomotive

2) a cargo ship

3) more fun, if you simply need loads of data at a particular place in the
universe at a particular time, and that place and time happens to align with
the movement of the Earth, you can just load up a warehouse with the data and
just wait. It's a special case that just happens to turn out to be highly
optimal.

(it's similar to the theoretical time machine which is just a comfortable
chair in a quiet room, it's guaranteed to take you into the future)

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EvanAnderson
If your connection is so bad that you have to resort to shipping physical
media to upload data efficiently I wonder how you're going to make effective
use of the data once it's loaded into "the cloud". I understand that most
consumer Internet connectivity (in the United States, at least) is asymmetric,
but it seems like constrained upstream capacity would go hand-in-hand with
constrained downstream capacity, too. I understand "seeding" the remote
storage for backup applications, where you wouldn't be frequently accessing a
large amount of the corpus, but I wonder how this would work with applications
like moving your personal media library out to remote servers if you were one
of these people with a connection that's so bad that you need to resort to
moving physical substrate around to move bits.

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Ellipsis753
Very cool. I would be interested to know how they get the data off the
harddrive again. Would this work with a broken harddrive (by swapping the
disk) or do they just plug it in somewhere and wait a couple of days while
everything copies off. I would probably guess the latter but who knows?

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toomuchtodo
They just plug it in and run an import process, very similar to how Amazon's
AWS Import/Export process works:

[http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/](http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/)

If you need data recovered, you're going to have to run ddrescue yourself.

Now, what would be really cool? If they had multiple locations to do the
import from (Provo, Austin, KC/MO anyone?), so you could get the data to them
quicker when they have a sizable backhaul nearby.

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shimsham
What next?! Access to our wireless networks?

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mslot
Probably whatever AWS did 4 years ago.

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Paul12345534
Their pricing for the hard drive is reasonable but their storage pricing is
higher than what I pay with Crashplan ;) I haven't taken advantage of
Crashplan's initial drive seeding because my upload speed is fast enough.

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Paul12345534
2TB uploaded so far to Crashplan in around 3 months.

