There are several backup solutions (Arq, JungleDisk, etc) that will store your data on Amazon's S3 service. However, the restore process is fairly painful as it requires downloading potentially hundreds of GB which takes a long time. I'm aware of the hard drive service that Amazon offers, but AFAIK you're required to mail a drive to Amazon and they will put the data you want on it and mail it back. However, I've often thought that since Amazon also sells hard drives, they could skip a step and allow someone to purchase the disk, have Amazon can put the data on it, and mail it to the buyer. For people replacing a failed hard drive, it's likely that they will buy one from Amazon anyway, and this would save them a lot of time.

I'm sure if you contacted them first you can set the HDD to ship right to Amazon and they'll load it up and send it to your home address.

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum

I'm reading Operating Systems: Design and Implementation by Tanenbaum right now. He's damned clever and turns what could easily be very dry material into something quite readable and occasionally very funny.

Terrible ping times, though.

Well, a station wagon full of 32GB MicroSD cards would be even better :)

If you're going to say that then why not a juggernaut full of 32GB MicroSD cards.

Or, today, an express mail envelope full of DVD-Rs.

For large data, I think it's much more convenient. On similar note : http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/09/09/us-safrica-pigeon-...

Useful for companies, expensive for regular users

Not to be snarky in any regard, but what is a use case for needing to upload an enormous EBS image? Like for some sort of non-deterministic data processing where you already have a large set of data to process?

If you're switching your app's hosting over to EC2 and want to transfer your hundreds of gigs of database files, this may be the easiest way to do it.

Also, I suspect the exporting data (for keeping physical backups) may be the more common use case.

Old news. This has been in place for years.

Wrong, it has been in place for S3. This applies to EBS volumes. Please read the article before you comment.