Abstract: In various embodiments, methods and systems for transferring data using a storage medium are provided. A storage medium may be shipped by a customer to a datacenter such that the data on the storage medium is copied to a storage associated with the datacenter or data in the storage is copied to the storage medium. The datacenter may support a cloud computing infrastructure that provides a storage account to the customer that is associated with the data copied from or copied to the storage medium. The storage medium further corresponds to a data transfer manifest that includes at least in part data mapping between storage service infrastructure and data in the storage medium. It is contemplated that embodiments of the present invention may further be implemented with data transfer service components that support a client component, storage service component, and a data transfer management component.

Abstract: In various embodiments, methods and systems for providing access to file systems are provided. An SFA-based operation having an operation modifier for a file in a file system is received. The SFA-based operation is defined based on a file-representational state transfer (REST) interface. The SFA-REST interface comprises integrated functionality of an SFA protocol and REST protocol. The SFA-based operation is executed using the operation modifier. A REST-based operation for the file in the distributed file storage is received. The REST-based operation is defined based on the SFA-REST interface. The operation modifier is referenced in order to execute the REST-based operation. The REST-based operation based on the SFA-REST interface. A schema can be implemented for accessing the file system. The schema includes tables to store files, the table comprises fields corresponding to elements of a SFA-REST interface. A snapshot component can be implemented to backup file shares in the file system.