Data Transfer and Migration
For moving data into Cloud Storage, the right tool depends on source and scale: the gsutil command-line tool or the Storage Transfer Service for cloud-to-cloud or on-premises transfers, and the Transfer Appliance (a physical hardware device Google ships to you) for genuinely large datasets where uploading over a network connection would take too long to be practical.
Practical Details
Storage Transfer Service specifically supports scheduled, repeating transfers from sources like AWS S3 or on-premises file systems, which matters for an ongoing sync rather than a one-time migration -- gsutil alone is better suited to a single manual transfer or scripted one-off job.
Actionable Considerations
- Use Storage Transfer Service for recurring or scheduled transfers (like an ongoing S3-to-GCS sync), not just one-time migrations.
- Consider a Transfer Appliance for genuinely large datasets (many terabytes+) where network upload time would be impractical.
- Validate transferred data with checksums -- Storage Transfer Service and gsutil both support this -- rather than assuming a large transfer completed without corruption.