This question comes up pretty often so I thought I would do a video for it.
When you first start out with Amazon EC2, one of the most obvious questions to ask is ‘How do I get data onto my shiny, new Amazon-run machine?’.
The answer is pretty straightforward, but not always obvious when you are first starting out.
I’ve found that this is more of a problem with Windows EC2 users. Most Linux folks are used to wget and scp so they can get their data back and forth pretty easily. There are of course Windows ports of those tools, but I think it is more common for Windows folks to use things like FTP, WebDAV, etc.
In the next set of short videos, I’m going to explore a number of ways to copy data back and forth between a Windows EC2 instance and your local physical machine.
The first method we will examine is pretty straightforward - we can simply use Remote Desktop to share the drives of our local machine with our remote machine. In the video below - I’m able to share my local file system and DVD with my Windows EC2 instance. This is particularly handy if I need to add Windows components to my instance; I can just pop my Windows installation CD into my local machine and access it remotely.
