Amazon Import / Export

The book I read to research this post was Amazon Import / Export Developer Guide which is a very good book which I downloaded for free from kindle. You could be forgiven for thinking that Import / Export has something to do with importing hard drives from Thailand but the truth is a little bit less exciting. It's actually a high speed data transfer service. You have to have either a S3 or simple storage service or EC2 or elastic compute cloud account. You then can send AWS your storage media and they will either import or export data and even wipe your media if requested. I think generally you use pen drives. They even send it back to you by courier which is included in the price. This service is only available at their asian, european & american server farms. The locations are Singapore in Asia, Ireland in Europe & Northern California for America. A further service they do is store your data on an offline server. If in an emergency you need a complete back up they will send that to you. Normally they send you a barcode sticker which you attach to the media but on more sensitive stuff you copy a file you must name signature and which is called a signature file onto the media. If you need a snapshot it's done in EBS format but this can't be imported onto media and can only be exported onto a EC2 server.