Amazon Web Services has announced a new AWS Import/Export feature. A potentially huge step forward for data portabilty when using the Amazon Cloud computing infrastructure.

In a recent post by AWS Evangelist, Jeff Barr outlined the new functionality stating that "using a workflow similar to the one you'd use to import data, you prepare a MANIFEST file, email it to us, receive a job identifier in return, and then send us one or more specially prepared storage devices. We'll take the devices, verify them against your manifest file, copy the data from one or more S3 buckets to your device(s) and ship them back to you."

A "specially prepared" storage device contains a SIGNATURE file. The file uniquely identifies the Import/Export job and also authenticates your request.

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