AWS Snowball - Transferring Data with the Snowball Client; Using the Snowball Client

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AWS Snowball User Guide

Transferring Data with the Snowball Client

The Snowball client is a standalone terminal application that you run on your local workstation to do

your data transfer. You don't need any coding knowledge to use the Snowball client. It provides all

the functionality you need to transfer data, including handling errors and writing logs to your local

workstation for troubleshooting and auditing. For information on best practices to improve your data

transfer speeds, see Best Practices for AWS Snowball (p. 33).

You can download and install the Snowball client from the AWS Snowball Tools Download page. Once

there, ﬁnd the installation package for your operating system, and follow the instructions to install the

Snowball client. Running the Snowball client from a terminal in your workstation might require using a

speciﬁc path, depending on your operating system:

• Linux – The Snowball must be run from the ~/snowball-client-linux-build_number/bin/ directory.

• Mac – The install.sh script creates symbolic links (symlinks) in addition to copying folders from the

Snowball client .tar ﬁle to the /usr/local/bin/snowball directory. If you run this script, you can then run

the Snowball client from any directory, as long as the /usr/local/bin is a path in your bash_proﬁle. You

can verify your path with the echo $PATH command.

• Windows – Once the client has been installed, you can run it from any directory without any additional

preparation.

Note

We recommend that you use the latest version of the Linux or Mac Snowball client, as they

both support the Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions (AES-NI) extension to the

x86 instruction set architecture. This oﬀers improved speeds for encrypting or decrypting

data during transfers between the Snowball and your Mac or Linux workstations. For more

information on AES-NI, including supported hardware, see AES instruction set on Wikipedia.

Topics

• Using the Snowball Client (p. 52)

Using the Snowball Client

Following, you can ﬁnd an overview of the Snowball client, one of the tools that you can use to transfer

data between your on-premises data center and the Snowball. The Snowball client supports transferring

the following types of data to and from a Snowball.

Sources of data that can be imported with the Snowball client are as follows:

• Files or objects hosted in locally mounted ﬁle systems.

• Files or objects from a Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) cluster. Currently, only HDFS 2.x clusters

are supported.

Note

Each ﬁle or object that is imported must be less than or equal to 5 TB in size.

Because the computer workstation from which or to which you make the data transfer is considered

to be the bottleneck for transferring data, we highly recommend that your workstation be a powerful

computer. It should be able to meet high demands in terms of processing, memory, and networking. For

more information, see Workstation Speciﬁcations (p. 93).

Topics

• Testing Your Data Transfer with the Snowball Client (p. 53)