Offline Disk Import for Google Cloud Storage - ship your HDDs to Google (opens in new tab)

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?

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

What next?! Access to our wireless networks?

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.

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.

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.