Posts Tagged ‘disaster recovery planning’

Exploit the power of Amazon S3 with CloudBerry Explorer freeware.

This post is cour­tesy of Nadya

Exploit the power of Ama­zon S3 with Cloud­Berry Explo­rer freeware.

Ama­zon S3

Ama­zon S3 is a web ser­vice that allows relia­ble and secure sto­rage of your data in the mul­ti­ple data cen­ters with unli­mi­ted capa­city and sca­la­bi­lity. It allows you to easily scale up your data sto­rage to meet gro­wing needs of your busi­ness. What’s more you pay only for what you actually use and you don’t have to pro­vi­sion ser­vers to match anti­ci­pate growth far in advance of this growth start hit­ting you. You don’t have to invest in the hard­ware infras­truc­ture and you don’t have to pay for ongoing ope­ra­tions of those ser­vers.  You just pay low fee for data sto­red on Ama­zon ser­vers.
Howe­ver Ama­zon S3 is pri­ma­rily desig­ned for soft­ware engi­neers who would inte­grate the S3 with their web plat­form using so called S3 API which is based on REST and SOAP.  This makes it dif­fi­cult for less sophis­ti­ca­ted users to employ Ama­zon S3 who would other­wise bene­fit from the sca­la­ble web sto­rage as well. But at the same time it opens an oppor­tu­nity to 3^rd party ven­dors such Cloud­Berry lab and many others to unleash the power of Ama­zon S3 for consumers.

With Cloud­Berry Explo­rer you can

• Allow end users to accom­plish sim­ple tasks without spe­cial tech­ni­cal knowledge
• Auto­mate time-consuming tasks to improve productivity
• With Cloud­Berry Explo­rer, Ama­zon S3 beco­mes an exten­sion to your local sto­rage. 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. For secu­rity pur­po­ses, the S3 accounts can be pass­word pro­tec­ted and access can be restricted

Now let’s look at some of the Cloud­Berry Explo­rer func­tio­nal capabilities

Browse S3 Buckets

Cloud­Berry Explo­rer allows you to browse con­tents of your S3 buc­ket and create new buc­kets and fol­ders and rename files.  It works just like Win­dows Explo­rer or any other file sys­tem brow­ser.

Copy Files in background

Cloud­Berry Explo­rer allows you to copy files in the back­ground, you can turn to other tasks while copy pro­cess is run­ning. You can also pause/ resume copy pro­cess and review copy queue for errors.  You can also hide Cloud­Berry Explo­rer to sys­tem tray to free up some space on your task bar while copy pro­cess is run­ning. It will tell you when the pro­cess is over.

Regis­ter Mul­ti­ple S3 Accounts

Cloud­Berry Explo­rer allows you to regis­ter as many Ama­zon S3 accounts as you like

Setup access con­trol lists (ACL)

Cloud­Berry Explo­rer allows you to setup access con­trol lists (ACL) with ACL edi­tor, you can grant access rights to other Ama­zon S3 users or to any inter­net users. ACL edi­tor reminds you the one that you use to manage file per­mis­sions on Win­dows.
Besi­des, you can pro­pa­gate buc­ket ACL to all files in that buc­ket– something that Ama­zon S3 doesn’t pro­vide out of the box.

Effi­ciently copy files bet­ween S3 accounts

Cloud­Berry explo­rer pro­vi­des for fast and effi­cient way to copy objects bet­ween two Ama­zon S3 accounts, it leve­ra­ges Ama­zon S3 capa­bi­li­ties to run this pro­cess on Ama­zon ser­vers without the need to down­load files to your local com­pu­ter.

Gene­rate Web URL

Cloud­Berry Explo­rer allows you to gene­rate URL for sin­gle or mul­ti­ple objects. You can also gene­rate time limi­ted URLs that will expire at a pre­de­fi­ned time. You can also spe­cify CNA­MEs to make your URLs look nicer and use http://chilp.it/ URL shor­te­ning ser­vice and BiTo­rrent URLs.

Cus­tom HTTP headers

Cloud­Berry Explo­rer allows you to setup cus­tom http hea­ders such as Cache-Control and Expi­res that allow you to cut your Ama­zon S3 trans­fer costs. For more infor­ma­tion how to cut costs check out here.

Con­fi­gure Cloud­Front Distribution

Cloud­Front is another Ama­zon ser­vice that works in con­junc­tion with S3 and allows for effi­cient con­tent dis­tri­bu­tion. The con­tent is published to data cen­ters in mul­ti­ple geo­graphi­cal zones and the user down­load con­tent from the ser­ver that requi­res fewer net­work hops. All this hap­pens trans­pa­rently to the end user and the publisher pay a small per usage base fee.
Cloud­Berry Explo­rer allows you to con­fi­gure Ama­zon Cloud­Front ser­vice in a mat­ter of minu­tes.  Just select a buc­ket and click a but­ton on the tool­bar.

PowerShell Com­mand Line Interface

Finally, Cloud­Berry Explo­rer ships with a set of PowerShell cmd­lets which you can use to script bulk or fre­quent ope­ra­tions. Most of the fea­tu­res avai­la­ble thru the user inter­face are also avai­la­ble though a PowerShell com­mand line inter­face. You can com­bine Cloud­Berry Explo­rer com­mands with regu­lar PowerShell com­mands. PowerShell is desig­ned to ope­rate with other objects, so you’re not limi­ted to com­mand syn­tax. You can write com­plex scripts with loops and con­di­tions and sche­dule rou­ting tasks such as data bac­kup or cleanup.

Cloud­Berry Explo­rer PRO version

Cloud­Berry Lab is currently wor­king on a pro­fes­sion edi­tion of Cloud­Berry Explo­rer. This pro­duct will fea­ture com­pres­sion, encryp­tion, GZIP sup­port, multi threa­ded files trans­fer and FTP source sup­port. It would require wri­ting a sepa­rate article just to make an over­view of these fea­tu­res and we simply don’t have enough space here. Pro­fes­sio­nal edi­tion will have a small licen­sing fee asso­cia­ted with it.

Conc­lu­sion

One final note is that Cloud­Berry Lab tries to stay on top of what works best for Ama­zon S3 users and deli­vers new ver­sion almost every month. It has been 6(!) com­mer­cial relea­ses since Cloud­Berry Explo­rer was first relea­sed in Novem­ber, 2008.
Ove­rall Cloud­Berry Explo­rer is a solid Ama­zon S3 client that can help deve­lo­pers, web desig­ners and other users who want to exploit Ama­zon S3 and Cloud­Front ser­vi­ces.  If you work with Ama­zon S3 on Win­dows or con­si­de­ring using Ama­zon S3 it is a good rea­son to start now and down­load Cloud­Berry Explo­rer from Cloud­Berry Lab web­site at http://cloudberrylab.com/

Automating Amazon S3 Backup on Windows with CloudBerry S3 Backup

This post is cour­tesy of Nadya

Cloud­Berry S3 Bac­kup is a Win­dows appli­ca­tion that auto­ma­tes bac­kup and res­tore pro­ces­ses to Ama­zon S3 secure cloud sto­rage.  Cloud­Berry S3 Bac­kup pro­vi­des a power­ful Bac­kup and Res­tore pro­gram desig­ned to leve­rage Ama­zon S3storage to make your disas­ter reco­very plan sim­ple, relia­ble, and affor­da­ble.
Disas­ter reco­very plan­ning is often times an afterthought that comes to light when disas­ter stri­kes.
Very sel­dom do com­pa­nies fully reco­ver from loss of cri­ti­cal data which could lead to loss of business.

What is Ama­zon S3

To use Cloud­Berry S3 Bac­kup you should create your Ama­zon S3 account. Ama­zon S3 is unli­mi­ted secure inter­net sto­rage that leve­ra­ges Ama­zon infras­truc­ture.  Ama­zon S3 is pri­ma­rily desig­ned for soft­ware deve­lo­pers who want to take advan­tage of sca­la­ble inter­net sto­rage in their appli­ca­tions. Howe­ver, the pro­ducts like Cloud­Berry S3 Bac­kup unleash the power of Ama­zon S3 and make it avai­la­ble for less sophis­ti­ca­ted consumers.

There are no sign-up or mini­mum fees. You only pay for what you use. In many cases your monthly checks will be less than a dollar! The costs start at $0.15 per GB of data sto­rage a month and ONLY (!) $0.03 per GB of data trans­fer until June, 30 2009.  The data trans­fer costs will return to the nor­mal $0.1 per GB as of July, 1 2009. So hurry up to do the ini­tial backup!

Check here for more info on Ama­zon S3 pricing.

With Cloud­Berry S3 Bac­kup you can

• Setup your bac­kup pro­cess in a cou­ple of minutes
• Strong data encryp­tion pro­tects your data from unautho­ri­zed access
• Data com­pres­sion allows you to lower your Ama­zon S3 sto­rage and trans­fer costs
• Sche­du­ling capa­bi­li­ties auto­mate the bac­kup process
• Bac­kups are avai­la­ble for reco­very 24/7
• Intui­tive inter­face pro­vi­des easy file and fol­der selec­tion capabilities
• No pro­prie­tary sto­rage for­mat. You can access your files using other Ama­zon S3 tools.
• Con­trol band­width uti­li­za­tion to do other tasks online when bac­kup is running
• Sup­port mul­ti­ple sto­rage clouds in the future such as Mic­ro­soft Azure, Sun Cloud Sto­rage Service

This is a long list of Cloud­Berry S3 Bac­kup features.

• Easy ins­ta­lla­tion and configuration
• Sche­du­ling capabilities
• Data encryp­tion
• Data reten­tion schedule
• Secure online storage
• Bac­kup verification
• Aler­ting notifications
• Indi­ca­tion for successful/failed bac­kup status
• The abi­lity to res­tore to a par­ti­cu­lar date
• Bac­kup open files
• Band­width throttling
• Sup­port SSL for secure data connection
• Mini­mize to tray
• Built-in feed­back form

Conc­lu­sion

Cloud­Berry S3 Bac­kup is a fully func­tio­nal bac­kup pro­duct that can help com­pu­ter users ran­ging from pri­vate indi­vi­duals to small and mid size busi­ness leve­rage Ama­zon S3 secure and relia­ble Cloud sto­rage to auto­mate data bac­kup and res­tore pro­ces­ses.  If you are con­si­de­ring using Ama­zon S3 for data bac­kup pur­po­ses it is a good rea­son to start now and down­load Cloud­Berry S3 Bac­kup from Cloud­Berry Lab web­site at http://cloudberrydrive.com/