I'm a big fan of Amazon Web Services (AWS). I use Amazon S3 to backup my websites every day and have used the CloudFront as an inexpensive CDN for image hosting. Lots of individuals and businesses also use S3 as a cloud-based backup too, using Jungle Disk, S3Fox, and other utilities to transfer files directly to S3.

But what happens if you have A LOT of data to transfer. Like hundreds of gigabytes, or multiple terabytes? If you want to take advantage of the various AWS services -- say you want to backup all of your home movies for double-security/potential global access or your business has a few terrabytes of data it would like to incoporate with an EC2 application -- how long is it going to take to actually transfer that much data? It almost seems like it would be faster to just ship Amazon a hard drive and let them transfer everything. Which is exacty what Amazon is proposing you do with its new AWS Import/Export service.

The service, which is in limited beta (you can apply now) and currently only uploads to US-based S3 buckets for now, works like this:

• Fill out an electronic form detailing your S3 bucket info, AWS password and a shipping address
• Attach some signed digital files to your external device
• Mail your external hard drive, with all required power adaptors and connection cables to Amazon.

Once the drive is received, the data will be transferred to your AWS account (the type of drive you send can impact the data transfer speed, for instance, eSATA will be faster than USB) and the drive will be mailed back to you.

The price? $80 per device, plus $2.50 for each hour of transfer required. Right now, the service only supports sending data to Amazon, but in the future, Amazon will support sending external drives with large amounts of data back to customers, similar to what Backblaze offers its customers as a recovery solution.

Amazon has a great pricing calculator so you can work out how expensive a large transfer might be as compared to standard S3 upload bandwidth costs (which are not charged for AWS Import/Export transfers) and the detaild description section of the AWS Import/Export page lists the transfer time for uploading 1 TB of data at various connection rates.

If you have lots of data you would like to host on Amazon's secure cloud, AWS Import/Export might just be the right tool for the job!

A while back, we asked for reader feedback for off-site backup solutions. Unsurprisingly, many of you said you used Jungle Disk which is a disk-based utility that allows for easy backup to Amazon's S3 storage platform. S3 is inexpensive, efficient and Amazon's servers are fast, which makes it a great tool to use for either server or local drive backups. However, if you don't want to stare at the command line or grapple with a web interface, especially for automated backups, Jungle Disk is a tremendous time savor.

Today, Jungle Disk released version 2.0 of their software for Windows, Mac and Linux. You can read the release notes, but here are some highlights:

• Brand new interface that makes setting up the service easier than ever and a very intuitive back-up selection utility
• Support for Jungle Disk 2.0 buckets and compatibility buckets
• Support for European S3 buckets
• Support for multiple backups and independent scheduling
• Previous versions feature
• Improved performance