Last year, Amazon announced AWS Import/Export Snowball, a petabyte-scale data transport solution enabling the transfer of large amounts of data into and out of the AWS cloud.

At the time, the ability to move data to AWS using the model was available. Now, it can be used for data export operations.

“If you have collected, generated, or stored large terabytes or petabytes of data in AWS and need to get to it more quickly than you could via a network connection, you can now use AWS Import/Export Snowball instead,” says Amazon’s Jeff Barr.

“You simply log in to the AWS Management Console, create an export request, and specify the data to be exported,” he adds. “A single request can span one or more Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets. The service will determine how many appliances are needed (each one can hold up to 50 terabytes) and create the export jobs accordingly. The appliances will be prepared, data will be copied to them, and they will be shipped to the address specified in the request. You can track each of these steps using the Console.

Barr notes that if your data is stored in Amazon Glacier, you’ll need to restore it to S3 with the Lifecycle Restore feature first.

More information about Amazon Import/Export Snowball is available here.

Images via iStock, Amazon