Santa Clara County – Google has announced its new service for developers called “Offline Media Import/Export” which will allow users to migrate to cloud storage terabytes of data by mailing hard drives, USB flash drives, and tapes.
Google, which now offers additional physical storage formats, will not be handling the transfer of data themselves. Iron Mountain is the third-party company that will be in charge of this new service.
Although developers will not depend on the Internet to upload its files to Google´s cloud storage, they will have to pay a fee, which has not been announced.
There are other details that remain unknown, such as how the “Export” part of the service will work, as everything is now focused on uploading data and not on downloading or mailing costumers a hard drive. What Google did mention was that the service will be offered in other parts of the world for is currently limited to those in the US.
In explaining the service, Google said that once the data is ready to be upload into Google’s storage cloud, a technician will hook up any physical media that the user have sent. The service provider can return the drive to the user, destroy it or keep it. This is a function that could take as long as 100 days for one terabyte of data to be uploaded over a standard business DSL connection.
With the offer of its own enterprise-grade cloud storage, Google is competing against Amazon and Microsoft for storing data from big Internet players like Snapchat and Netflix. As Google says on its Offline Media Import/Export product page, it’s taking a hands-off approach to onboarding service providers and is not liable for their actions.
Source: Google Cloud Platform