The daunting realities of data transport apply to most projects. How do you gracefully move from your current location to your new cloud, with minimal disruption, cost and time? What is the smartest way to actually move your GB, TB or PB of data?

It's a basic underlying problem: how much data can move how far how fast? For a best case scenario use this formula:

Number of Days = (Total Bytes)/(Megabits per second * 125 * 1000 * Network Utilization * 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours)

For example, if you have a T1 connection (1.544Mbps) and 1TB (1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 bytes) to move in or out of AWS the theoretical minimum time it would take to load over your network connection at 80% network utilization is 82 days.

Relax. We’ve done this before. We've found that customers approach this in two ways: they use very basic unmanaged migration tools to move their data or they select one of Amazon's suite of services.

As a general rule of thumb, for best results we suggest: