How to manage Amazon S3 Versioning with CloudBerry Explorer

Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer PRO 1.8.2 and later.

Versioning is an exciting new feature that makes Amazon S3 that allows you to create versions of objects instead of overwriting them and keep them on S3. Versioning support dramatically increases a range of Amazon s3 of possible applications and it is only limited by your imagination. It is currently in beta and as of February, 8 2010 supported across all Amazon S3 regions.

Newer version of CloudBerry Explorer comes with support for versioning. You can turn on versioning aware mode, turn on versioning for specific buckets and perform common file operations on versions. This article will give you some ideas on how to get started.

How CloudBerry Explorer supports Versioning

To turn versioning on for a specific bucket click versioning in the context menu and check the appropriate checkbox. Now you will be able to create versions of the objects for that bucket.

Try to copy an object with the same name to the bucket several times. To see versions click Show Versions item in the context menu

This option will show a bottom panel with the list of versions for a selected file. . Current revision is version of the object that is available using regular Amazon S3 API. Now you can do all the regular file operations with the versions such as copy, delete, move, rename, etc.

What about deleted files

As you can guess (or read in the versioning documentation) when you turn the versioning on for a bucket, and then delete a file a new version is created with deleted attribute. This is awesome if you delete file by mistake as you can quickly restore it. To show the deleted file you have to turn on a corresponding option. This option is global and found in Tools | Options in the main menu.

Once you have done that try deleting a file in the bucket with versioning turned on. You will notice that the file becomes grayed and you will see a new version created in the versioning panel marked as deleted.

If you want to restore a deleted file or just any version of a file select the version and click Restore button. The file will be available again.

What’s next

Our CloudBerry Backup users know that we have our own implementation of file versioning. We have done that awhile ago before Amazon announced its versioning implementation. We are going to replace our own versioning with Amazon S3 native versioning as we believe it is more efficient to rely on the platform rather than inventing own things. Stay tuned!

CloudBerry S3 Explorer is a Windows freeware product that helps managing Amazon S3 storage and CloudFront . You can download it at http://cloudberrylab.com/

CloudBerry S3 Explorer PRO is a Windows program that helps managing Amazon S3 storage and CloudFront . You can download it at http://cloudberrylab.com/ It is currently in beta and free for all users. You can download it at http://cloudberrylab.com/

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Google Docs and CloudBerry Backup

On Tuesday Google announced that in a couple of weeks it will start providing file storage as a part of their Google Docs offering. This statement makes Google another online storage provider similar to Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Nirvanix, and others.

According to Google you will be able to upload to Google Docs any file up to 250 MB. You'll have 1 GB of free storage for files you don't convert into one of the Google Docs formats (i.e. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations), and if you need more space, you can buy additional storage for $0.25 per GB per year.

While we believe that the most advanced and mature storage currently available is Amazon S3 the pricing structure makes Google very attractive to home users and small businesses. By the end of Q1 2010 we are going to start offering the version of CloudBerry Backup that will automate data backup to Google Online storage. Stay tuned!

How to configure Backup Window with CloudBery Backup for Amazon S3

Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Backup 1.3.3 and later.

CloudBerry S3 Backup is a powerful Windows backup and restore that automate backup and restore processes to Amazon S3 cloud storage. With 1.3.3 release we fixed a number of issues reported by our customers, increased product reliability and introduced a feature that allows specifying for how long to run a backup job.

To take advantage of the new feature open Backup Plan Wizard and go to the Schedule step. There is a new option Stop the plan if it runs for. You can specify the number of hours and minutes you want to run your backup plan.

In the example below you schedule a backup plan to run every day at midnight and you want to run it for 6 hours the most. When you wake up at 6AM and start working on the computer backup job should be completed and it will not consume your bandwidth and CPU allowing you to work on other things efficiently. Next time backup job runs, at 12 AM in this case, it will continue where it left off.

This option is very useful for initial backups because you may want to copy many gigabytes of data and obviously you can do it quickly. To make it work smoothly you now have a backup window and you backup job can run at times where you don’t use your computer to do other tasks.

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CloudBerry Backup is a Windows program that leverages Amazon S3 storage. It costs $29.99 per copy and you can download 30 days fully functional trial version at http://cloudberrydrive.com/

CloudBerry Backup for Windows Home Server supports Drive Extender

With the release of CloudBerry Backup for Windows Home Server 1.3.3 we introduce a support for Drive Extender.

What is Drive Extender?

According to Wikipedia Windows Home Server Drive Extender is a file-based replication system that provides three key capabilities:

* Multi-disk redundancy so that if any given disk fails, data is not lost

* Arbitrary storage expansion by supporting any type of hard disk drive

* A single folder namespace (no drive letters)

If you translate it to less technical terms it means that you can add disks to your home server and it will automatically spread your data across them. What’s more you don’t have to deal with drive letters directly but with file shares managed by Drive Extender.

What about CloudBerry Backup

Previous version of CloudBerry Backup allowed you to refer to disks on the Home Server directly. This approach has a disadvantage in that under certain conditions backup would miss files residing on other disks on the server if you have not manually added all the drives. Newer version of CloudBerry Backup allows you to back up data on Shared Folders managed by Drive Extender and no data is missed.

As you can see on the screenshot below the Shared Folders are listed along with the drive letters now.

Note: you will still be able to backup disk drives directly, but this is not recommended and the option will be off by default.

Please note you should uninstall previous versions of CloudBerry Online Backup if you ever had it before.

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CloudBerry S3 Backup for Windows Home Server is WHS add-on that automates data backup and restore to online storage powered by Amazon S3 cloud storage. It comes with onetime fee of $29.99 (US) and you can download fully functional 30 days evaluation version at http://www.cloudberrylab.com/default.aspx?page=backup-whs

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Happy Holidays!

Dear customers, partners and everyone who happen to read our blog. We would like to take this opportunity to wish you all Very Happy Holidays! We hope the 2010 will bring you success in every way!

Thank you for all your support!

Yours,

CloudBerry Lab team.

Modified ACL Editor

Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer 1.7.2 and later.

Our users keep asking us on the ability to manage all ACL settings in one place and see all settings at a glance. We decided to modify ACL Editor and show all settings on one screen. Here is how it looks like now. We hope this enhancement will make it easier for you to work with CloudBerry Explorer freeware and you chose it over other Amazon S3 clients

CloudBerry S3 Explorer is a Windows freeware product that helps managing Amazon S3 storage and CloudFront . You can download it at http://cloudberrylab.com/

CloudBerry S3 Explorer PRO is a Windows program that helps managing Amazon S3 storage and CloudFront . You can download it at http://cloudberrylab.com/ It is currently in beta and free for all users. You can download it at http://cloudberrylab.com/

Like our products? Please help us spread the word about them. Learn here how to do it.

How to configure CloudFront Streaming with CloudBerry S3 Explorer

Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer 1.7.2 and later.

Amazon CloudFront’s new streaming feature allows you to stream your content directly from Amazon s3 bucket. New version of CloudBerry Explorer helps to configure a streaming distribution and generate URLs for streaming content as well as HTML code for your video player.

How to configure Streaming Distribution

Configuration is easy and straightforward. First, select a bucket, right click it and select Streaming option in the context menu.

Click Enable Streaming Distribution checkbox and click ok. This is the only necessary step. You can also optionally enter CNAMEs and Comment. Check out our blog post for more info on how to configure CNAMEs.

By this time you have configured your distribution for streaming. Note that the bucket configured as a streaming distribution shows up with a new icon

How to generate streaming URLs

Select the file you want to generate a streaming URL for and click Web URL button on the toolbar. Web URL dialog will recognize that you are creating a URL for streaming distribution and enable corresponding options. One thing you should be able to do is to create RTMP URLs to embed them in the video player HTML code. Just select RTMP URL type and you are ready to copy the URL.

How to generate an HTML code for the player

Those familiar with streaming and players may want to skip this section but we would like to show how easy it is to embed the player on your website or blog and start streaming directly from CloudFront distributions.

There are a number of free players on the market and here we are going to demonstrate how to use JW Player (non-commercial version comes with a watermark, if you don’t like it you can buy it)

Anyways, if you choose an HTML option as shown on the screen the result will come in the form of HTML code for JW Player . You can copy and paste this code onto your blog or the website.

Note: You will have to download a Flash client, such as the JW Player and store the client in a web-accessible location. If storing in your Amazon S3 bucket, you can either serve it out of a CloudFront HTTP distribution or serve it directly from Amazon S3. You can't, however, use your same streaming distribution to serve both the client and the video. You'll need also to create a crossdomain.xml file to allow the client and video to come from separate domains.

Here's an example of the most permissive cross-domain XML:

You can download the sample crossdomain.xml file here (right click and click Save As)

Further information

You can update the code for your player using update HTML template link. Let’s say you want to use something other than JW Player and you can modify the template for your favorite player.

Besides, there is an easy to use code generation wizard on the Longtail Video website. We recommend that you use the wizard to generate your html code if you need more advanced options like player style and size. Full discussion of all the options is well outside of the scope of this article. Just make sure you select flvplayer with an rtmp stream

There is another freeware player that we want to mention for completeness: Flowplayer also comes in several editions and you can use the free one. Note that we currently don’t support generating the HTML code for the Flowplayer.

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CloudBerry S3 Explorer is a Windows freeware product that helps managing Amazon S3 storage and CloudFront . You can download it at http://cloudberrylab.com/

CloudBerry S3 Explorer PRO is a Windows program that helps managing Amazon S3 storage and CloudFront . You can download it at http://cloudberrylab.com/ It is currently in beta and free for all users. You can download it at http://cloudberrylab.com/

Like our products? Please help us spread the word about them. Learn here how to do it.