Back in November of 2008 I did an article awhile back on a way to use Amazon’s S3 to hook into Final Cut Server. At the time though, S3 had a pretty big limitation in that it wasn’t really suitable for backing up large video files as an archive device for Final Cut Server. But today, Amazon announced that S3 now supports files of up to 5 terabytes using multipart upload (previously the maximum file size was 5 gigabytes).
This finally means that files do not have to be broken up at the file system layer in order to back up to Amazon’s cloud. However, this does not mean that traditional disk-to-disk backup solutions can be leveraged to provide a good target for backups and archives as backups need to be performed using the multipart upload. The ability to now use S3 for large files allows us to finally use Amazon S3 in a way that is much simpler that it was to do so previously, although it is still not as transparent as using a file system or URI path.
Overall, this represents a great step for Amazon and I hope to see even more of this in the future!