Online vs Offline Transfer Choice

The online versus offline transfer choice compares network transfer time against the project deadline and the cost of adding bandwidth. Online transfer moves data from a private data center to Cloud Storage over a public internet connection, Direct Peering, or Cloud Interconnect. Offline transfer copies data locally to a Transfer Appliance and ships the appliance to Google for upload, without consuming outbound network bandwidth during capture.

The same data volume changes dramatically with bandwidth, as shown below:

Data volume	Network bandwidth	Estimated online time
100 TB	1 Gbps	Over 10 days, about 12 days with overhead
100 TB	100 Mbps	Over 100 days
300 TB	100 Mbps	About 9 months