Our customers tell us that importing multi-terabyte datasets, such as log files and media libraries, from other cloud-based 3rd party storage providers can be slow and expensive. Today, we’re introducing a limited preview of Online Cloud Import for Google Cloud Storage which makes it faster, easier and cheaper to import online data to your Cloud Storage buckets (standard or regional in US or Europe) using Google’s high performance network. Sign up for the limited preview here.

Online Cloud Import provides a number of options that makes data transfers and synchronization easier. Not only can you create a one-time backup/transfer of your data to your Cloud Storage bucket, but you can also set a periodic scheduled synchronization of your 3rd party storage to Google Cloud Storage. Additionally, you can configure your synchronization using a set of advanced filters based on file creation dates, file-name filters, and the times of day you prefer to import data. Once your data is synchronized, you will receive an email notification with a summary of the entire process.

Online Cloud Import complements both gsutil and Cloud Storage Offline Disk Import. Cloud Storage Offline Disk Import is suitable if you have hundreds of terabytes of offline data -- disk-upload centers are available in Switzerland, Japan, India and the United States. If you'd like command-line control, and are dealing with less than 10TB, we suggest using gsutil (now with rsync) to transfer your data.

We’re excited to offer another method of importing data into Cloud Storage, and we invite you to sign up for Online Cloud Import and let us know what you think.

-Posted by Lamia Youseff, Product Manager