Good news for companies struggling to bring their massive data sets online: Google has announced the launch of Offline Disk Import, a service which lets Google Cloud Storage users send Google physical hard drives for manual uploading. Sadly, this feature is only available to US users at the moment. Offline Disk Import is only relevant for companies with truly massive amounts of data stuck offline; Google says its service is targeted towards companies that need to upload data “in the hundreds of terabytes and beyond.” Given that uploading such a large data set would be difficult, or even impossible on many connections in the US, Offline Disk Import could be an excellent option at only $80 per hard drive (regardless of the size). Of course, this isn’t a new idea. Amazon has offered similar services as early as 2009 for S3.
