Hooray…Labor Day weekend….free-time…..yea me! Yeah right! Stealing time is not an easy task, trust me.
After I posted my article on “ClickOnce Hosting with Amazon S3”, Andy over at cloudberrylab asked me to give their app “CloudBerry Explorer for Amazon S3” a test drive. After moving to AWS S3, I haven’t had much time to track down many S3 apps for my tool box, so I decided to give this a shot.
I pointed my browser to cloudberrylab.com and off I went. After checking out their blog section and watch a short product demo (check out the resources section as well), I downloaded the “S3 Explorer FREEWARE” from here
S3 Explorer FREEWARE
CloudBerry S3 Explorer is a desktop application which allows you to connect to your Amazon S3 storage account and perform a lot of very useful tasks with just a few clicks, like creating buckets, uploading files etc.
Here are a few things that caught my eyes while I was looking at the features of this little puppy:
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Keep ACL for existing files when overwriting
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Support for “Requestor Pays” option
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Retry failed tasks
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Windows Desktop Application
There are tons of other features. You can read more
here
The installation is pretty straight forward. Just run the setup file you downloaded from the website. After the installation, launch the app from the icon created on the desktop (or start menu).
You’ll be prompted to register the app. It’s optional. I did in order to avoid it popping up every time I launch the program, besides its FREE!
The Explorer UI is pretty simple. Basically a tabbed view, meaning you can open different sessions in a new tab, like IE8 and up (a website in a new tab). What’s also cool is that if you are left-handed you can choose to access your file system on the right pane instead of the left (default view) while accessing the S3 bucket on the left.
To add your S3 account you can use the menu at the top or from the ‘Source” dropdown list. Click on File > Amazon S3 Accounts, you’ll see the following screen
Note: You can also export and import settings. This will allow you to easily transfer all the SE Explorer settings from one machine to another machine. For instance you can transfer all the settings from your desktop dev box to your laptop. The only thing I didn’t like was the fact that my secret keys are clearly visible in the XML config file.
Click on the “Add” button. In the screen (shown below), enter a name in the first text box. This can be any name of your choice. Then enter your AWS S3 Access Key and Secret Key in the second and third textboxes. That information can be obtained from logging into your Amazon Web Service account and going to the ‘Security Credentials” screen. Notice I checked marked “Use SSL” for a secure connection. Click on the “OK” button.
You’ll be taken back to the “Account Registration” screen. If you need to add additional accounts you can do so. When you are done, click the “Close” button on that screen.
You are now back at the explorer screen. In the left pane you can access your file system by simply double clicking the drive letters etc. Like windows explorer. There is also a mini nav bar and breadcrumb control, like vista.
On the right side, select the account you created from the “Source” dropdown box.
You can start creating your buckets by clicking on the bucket icon
Once your bucket is created, simply use the CloudBerry explorer lust like you would with Windows Explorer to move files from one destination to another. The same can be accomplished from the toolbar buttons
There you have it. You can now move files between your desktops, servers, etc to Amazon S3 Storage. CloudBerry Explorer is a very simple and easy-to-use application, yet a chock-full-of features. Also check out the options settings from the menu
and also the content types (from the menu as well). This I'll explain in a next post
To wrap it up, the lads over at CloudBerry Labs packed a lot of features into this littole app (for FREE). This app is for sure going into my S3 toolbox and a must have for a .NET developer using Amazon S3 Storage.
NORMAL PRINT: I am not affiliated with CloudBerry Labs in any way. Any support request should be sent to the support over at CloudBerry Labs. Install the application at your own risk. I am not responsible for any damages to your PC, Laptop, PDA, Wristwatch, microwave, coffee maker, flat screen tv, XBox 360, Wii, Play Station, IPOD, IPhone, Blackberry etc. after installing this application.