FREE Manage Amazon S3 with CloudBerry S3 Explorer

Stream Your Cloud

After a small rant about how S3 can be a pain to mange, my buddy Andy from CloudBerry offered up a nifty solution, a FREE manager that makes working with S3 easier than FTP.

CloudBerry Explorer is a familiar and easy to use graphical file manager for your Amazon S3 storage. It works on any Windows desktop, supports Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront services, PowerShell command line interface and best of all is absolutely free.

No wonder CloudBerry Lab – a startup behind the tool – has seen a tremendous uptake in their product popularity, and is rapidly innovating making the tool ever more powerful with each of the 5 (!) releases they had within last 6 months.

In a nutshell CloudBerry S3 Explorer lets you get the most out of S3:

• Storage is exposed as a file drive so no special technical knowledge is required,
• You can automate time-consuming tasks to improve productivity
• You are no longer limited to the classic data storage on your local drive(s). With CloudBerry Explorer, you can move files to Amazon S3 just as easily as managing them on your local drive(s).
• CloudBerry Explorer allows you to move large files such as photos, videos, and music to Amazon S3 and free up your local storage.
• The files on your Amazon S3 can be shared with anyone who has access to the internet.

Below is a video of its operation

Let’s start the product and give it a try!

Obtaining and installing the product

Getting the product is simple: go to http://cloudberrylab.com/ and click the big Download button.

Once you install the app and type in your Amazon credentials you get a nifty FTP-client-like UI with two panels on the right and on the left. From either side you can open a local disk, and a bucket of any registered Amazon S3 account.

CloudBerry Explorer Main Window

Amazon S3 account registration

You can register connection details to as many S3 accounts as you like and you can connect simultaneously to multiple accounts.

You can simultaneously work with any number of Amazon S3 accounts. You can open as many tabs as you like – exactly the same way as in any modern web browser:

Renaming objects

One of the features of the program that distinguishes it from others is the ability to rename objects, (files or folders).

Renaming objects in Amazon S3 using CloudBerry Explorer

As we say the devil is in details – so is the beauty of CloudBerry Explorer. For example, the address line is implemented in such a way that you can navigate to the folder by clicking its name in the address bar:

Address Bar in CloudBerry Explorer

Setting up ACL lists

You can edit access rights. For example, you can grant access rights to other Amazon S3 users.

Notice that CloudBerry Explorer has streamincloud in the list by default to help users setup proper permissions for http://streamincloud.com/ free video encoding service that converts video files to FLV.

Editing ACL

Creating object URLs

If you need to generate a web URL for your file just right click it and click Web URL.

Web URL

You can generate both secure HTTPS and plain HTTP URLs and you can setup CNAMEs to make your URLs look nicer:

Creating a CNAME

You can also generate a time limited URL that will only be valid for a predefined period of time.

Creating time limited URLs

Copying files between Amazon S3 accounts

CloudBerry Explorer allows you to copy files between two Amazon S3 accounts. The copy process is very fast and is carried out in Amazon data centers. In other words, files are not downloaded to your computer thus is works pretty fast. In addition, when copying files in the same geographical location e.g. US or EU the copying is free of charge.

Copy files between Amazon accounts

Configuring CloudFront distributions

CloudFront is a new Amazon service that allows for efficient and cost effective content delivery to multiple geographic locations. CloudFront works closely with Amazon S3 service and CloudBerry Explorer helps it to setup CloudFront distribution with a few mouse clicks. Select the bucket and click “Distribution” button on the toolbar.

Then configure distribution properties

Setting up CloudFront distribution

CloudBerry S3 Explorer Features

• Register any number of Amazon S3 accounts
• Simultaneous work with any number of Amazon S3 accounts
• Copy/Move files between accounts and buckets
• Share buckets and files Amazon S3 with others
• Create, view and delete S3 buckets
• Copying and moving files between Amazon S3 and local computer
• Setting access rights
• Automate routine tasks with Microsoft PowerShell
• Creation of external URL addresses
• Moving and copying in the background
• Support for MD5 to check files at the time of transfer to the S3
• Drag & Drop files from Windows Explorer
• Support service Amazon CloudFront
• Support CNAME
• Support for signed address URL, as well as the limited time
• Set lists ACL to child objects
• rename objects (files)
• Optimized performance when working with large number of files and large files
• Support streamincloud.com service to encode the video in FLV on the fly for Amazon S3
• Support PowerShell command line interface
• Automatic check for updates
• Built-in feedback form

This is a large list of feature, especially given that the software is free. To see more videos from CloudBerry Click Here To View The YouTube Channel. You can download CloudBerry S3 Explorer at http://s3explorer.cloudberrylab.com/

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Tags: CloudBerry, free, s3, software

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