CloudBerry S3 Backup reaches Release Candidate status, Explorer for Azure and Nirvanix

We are excited to tell everyone that CloudBerry Backup for Amazon S3 reaches Release Candidate status. This is a turnkey moment for our company. We are very close to start generating money from our product business.

Anyways, CloudBerry Backup RC1 is out and you can download it here. All existing users should get an automated notification about the availability of the new version. We have not introduced any new features but we have addressed a lot of issues as we believe it is more important to make the product work as expected rather than have a lot of cool features that don't work well.

I would also like to take this opportunity to tell everyone that we are looking for beta testers for

• CloudBerry Backup for Windows Home Server
• CloudBerry Explorer for Windows Azure
• CloudBerry Explorer for Nirvanix

Please sign-up on our website and we will notify you by email when those products become available.

Thanks

CloudBerry Lab team.

Introducing CloudBerry S3 Explorer for Windows Mobile

CloudBerry Lab noticed that Windows Mobile users don’t have a decent Amazon S3 client. We set to fix this disappointing discrepancy and decided to make CloudBerry Explorer for Windows Mobile

With CloudBerry Explorer mobile you will be able to off load some of your data to Amazon S3 account and free up the local storage. You can also make sure that your data is stored securely on Amazon S3.

The first version of CloudBerry Explorer for Windows Mobile will feature some basic capabilities such as

· Register and connect to any number of Amazon S3 accounts

· Work with any number of Amazon S3 accounts simultaneously

· Create, browse, and delete Amazon S3 buckets

· Create, browse, and delete folders

· Copy and move files between Amazon S3 and your local storage

CloudBerry Explorer Mobile is not available yet for download. You can subscribe for beta at http://cloudberrylab.com/ Once released CloudBerry Explorer Mobile will be available for free for all CloudBerry Explorer users.

How to configure S3Stat Log Analyzer Managed Mode for Amazon S3 and CloudFront with CloudBerry S3 Explorer

Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer 1.6.1 and later.

Amazon S3 Server access logging is an important part of Amazon S3 account management and there are several services available to analyze the log. S3stat is a popular service and cost effective service that delivers reports on the log files directly to an S3 bucket.

Some users have been concerned with the requirement to provide Amazon S3 access identifiers (access and security keys) to be able to use this service. It is no longer necessary if you use Self-Managed Mode It is possible to set up your own S3 Buckets in such a way that S3Stat can process them for you without needing your AWS credentials. It is a lot of effort to set it all up properly and we decided to support s3stat configuration in CloudBerry Explorer freeware.

Using CloudBerry Explorer to configure Self-Managed Mode

To enable s3stat support right click a bucket and click Logging| Logging Settings. This will take you to the logging screen.

Select S3Stat logging option and click ok. Then right click the same bucket and click ACL|ACL Settings. You should see S3Stat account in the list with Read/Write permissions on.

As you can see on the Logging tab S3Stat log files reside in the same bucket you configure S3Stat logging with prefix “log/access_log-”.

What about CloudFront log?

It is getting a little trickier with CloudFront log. First, enable S3stat on CloudFront Logging tab.

Since CloudFront log delivery mechanism doesn’t set ACL on the newly created log files to anybody but the bucket owner to make s3stat work you have to provide S3stat account with appropriate permissions to the log files. To do that you should use Schedule ACL Updates feature for a bucket. It will automatically apply bucket ACL to all files in the bucket

According to S3Stat Amazon CloudFront team is working on making it easier and in the future the second step will not be required.

If you came to this post by chance you should know that CloudBerry S3 Explorer is a Windows freeware product that helps managing Amazon S3 storage and CloudFront . You can download it at http://cloudberrylab.com/

You can sign-up for S3Stat Free trial without any obligations here http://www.s3stat.com/Setup/Register.aspx

Read more in S3stat blog Code on the Road: S3stat announces Self-Managed mode

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How to add custom Content-Types with CloudBerry S3 Explorer

Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer 1.5.2 and later.

CloudBerry S3 Explorer is a popular Amazon S3 file manager. It comes with a comprehensive list of Content-Type headers. However, every once in a while our customers bring to our attention the fact that we are missing a certain Content Type. If a Content Type is missing in the list we apply application/octet-stream default content type. Sometimes it can cause issues such as the one recently brought up by in this blog post Deliver videos by Amazon S3/Cloudfront to iPhone or iPod touch

In essence, the customer uploaded .m4v files that should be uploaded with video/x-m4v to render correctly in the browsers. Apparently video/x-m4v content type is not included in the default list and the default application/octet-stream content type is applied. As a result, the files could not be downloaded on iPod and iPhone devices. To solve the problem like this you should add a custom content type to the list.

How to add custom content type

To solve the issue you can go to Tools| Content Types. You can see the list of built-in content types there. Click Add to add a new content type.

Type .m4v for Extension and video/x-m4v for Content type. New header should appear in the list:

Click ok. Now you can upload files and correct header will be applied automatically.

What if I want to modify a content type for existing files

It is also possible and very easy to do. Just select the files you want to apply a new content type and click Set HTTP Headers button on the toolbar. Click Add in the pop-up dialog to add the header.

Choose Content-Type for Http Header and any value you need from the list. In our example it is video/x-m4v .

Note: you will still have to add this header if it has not been in the predefined list before as explained above.

Click ok and you will see the header in the list.

Click ok once again to apply the header to the files.

Conclusion

As you can see CloudBerry S3 Explorer provides you with a lot of flexibility when it comes to managing Content-Types and other http headers. Nevertheless we are committed to continuously improving our product and we will be adding missing Content Types to the predefined list to make it easier for our customers to use the product.

If you came to this post by chance you should know that CloudBerry S3 Explorer is a Windows freeware product that helps managing Amazon S3 storage and CloudFront . You can download it at http://cloudberrylab.com/

If you came to this post by chance you should know that 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.