37signals Dev — Moving Mountains of Data off S3

In this episode of RECORDABLES, we talk through the final and most nerve-racking part of our cloud exit — moving massive amounts of data out of Amazon S3. Principal Programmer Jeremy Daer shares how we moved billions of files with no downtime. He covers everything from dealing with bandwidth limits and AWS constraints to building custom tooling when off-the-shelf options won’t work. The conversation gets into the human side of a project like this, including verification, anxiety, and the moment you finally hit delete. You’ll also hear how long it actually takes to move that much data and the tools we used to make it happen seamlessly.