File Transfer Africa was approached by a large media company in South Africa and the job at hand was to transfer around a decade of content and images to Amazon in the United Kingdom, not only for long term cloud storage and safe keeping but to use the native Amazon PDF indexing capability to make this information searchable by the world.

The volume of data needing to be uploaded was 3.5 terabytes (3500 gigabytes), comprised of 2.6 million files, within 500,000 folders. File Transfer Africa was really excited to take on this challenge, not only to prove and showcase its capability but this piece of work will benefit the world in making more valuable information secure and searchable for generations to come.

The 3.5 terabytes and 2.6 million files were transferred at approximately 1 gigabyte per minute which equates to approximately, 60 gigabytes per hour or 1 terabyte every 12 hours which meant the file transfer took only a combined time of 40 hours ‘on the wire’. Below is a graph showing the performance of 1 terabyte of the upload in a 12 hour window during the upload. File Transfer Africa has no evidence to support this statement but they’d be surprised if anybody in Africa has ever moved this amount of data into Amazon or even off the African continent at these speeds in this time frame at this price point. This transfer may have been history!