Getting Started With Wasabi Ball

  • Updated on Jan 20, 2026
  • Published on Jan 16, 2026
  • 2 minute(s) read
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Prerequisites and Technical Restrictions

The terms and conditions associated with using Wasabi Ball are referenced in the Wasabi Ball quote. For more information, review Wasabi Technologies Wasabi Ball Transfer Appliance Terms and Disclaimer. In addition:

  • You are solely responsible for encrypting your data before transferring it to the Appliance. You are also responsible for requesting that Wasabi turn on volume-based encryption on the Appliance.

  • You are solely responsible for preserving an additional copy of your data uploaded to Wasabi Ball until the data has been successfully uploaded to Wasabi Hot Cloud Stoarge and validated by you following the completion of the upload process to Wasabi Hot Cloud Stoarge.

  • Files larger than 5 TB should not be transferred to Wasabi Ball because 5 TB is the largest file size supported by the S3 protocol.

  • You must rename files that have UTF-8 special characters before the files are transferred because Wasabi does not support these special characters.

Supported File Network Protocols

Wasabi Ball supports SMB, NFS, RSYNC, AFP, HTTP, and S3 file network protocols.

Receiving and Using the Wasabi Ball Transfer Appliance

  1. Contact your Wasabi account manager and request a Wasabi Ball Transfer Appliance.

  2. Your Wasabi account manager will send you a questionnaire. Complete this questionnaire to help Wasabi understand your use case.

  3. Upon receiving your completed questionnaire, Wasabi will ship a Wasabi Ball Transfer Appliance to the address provided in the questionnaire.

  4. You can connect the Wasabi Ball to your storage through NFS, SMB, or S3 to start the local transfer. Refer to:
    Wasabi Ball With a Netgear Device
    Wasabi Ball With a QNAP Device

    You can transfer up to 250 TB of data with a new Wasabi Ball device. (Older devices were used to transfer up to 100 TB per device.)

    Wasabi Ball is supported to ingest data in North America and the European Union regions. Wasabi plans to extend the support to other Wasabi regions. Additionally, you can use Wasabi replication/migration services to move data to any other Wasabi region.

  5. Once the data is transferred to the Wasabi Ball, you can ship the Appliance to Wasabi.

    The shipping label will include tracking information that you can use to track the Wasabi Ball while in transit. That information will be shared with you once we ship the Wasabi Ball.

  6. A Wasabi Sales Engineer will contact you through the support ticket to notify you that we have received the Wasabi Ball.

  7. Wasabi will ingest the data into the desired buckets in the desired Wasabi Ball-supported region.

    A Wasabi Sales Engineer will contact you through the support ticket to notify you once the data has been uploaded to Wasabi in your desired bucket(s).

  8. You can verify that the data is transferred to your Wasabi account using the Wasabi Console. A Wasabi Sales Engineer will work with you to verify this.

  9. Once you confirm that the data transferred through Wasabi Ball is available for access in your desired bucket and region, Wasabi will wipe the Wasabi Ball appliance clean, reset it to factory settings, and provide a confirmation of data deletion through the support ticket.

    Once you receive confirmation from Wasabi that the data transfer has been completed, it is your responsibility to verify that all the data is accessible as expected before deleting your local copy.

As a general guideline, the process typically takes around two weeks, accounting for both shipping and data transfer times. The speed of data transfer can vary depending on factors such as the speed of the local network, file size, and the read speed of data from your local servers.