Introducing CloudBerry Explorer for Azure Blob Storage

Recently we announced the beta release of CloudBerry Explorer for Nirvanix. In our attempt to increase the breadth of cloud storage support and we are proud to announce CloudBerry Explorer for Microsoft Azure Blob Storage as our third product in the series

What is Microsoft Azure?

Microsoft Azure is a cloud operating system where developers can host their applications to benefit from cloud platform. When you host application in the cloud you get virtually unlimited scalability and pay as you use model that hard to underestimate. Every cloud platform would be incomplete without storage support and Microsoft’s platform is not an exception. Azure comes with 3 types of storage: Table Storage, Queue Storage and Blob Storage.

What is Microsoft Azure Blob Storage

Among other storage types Azure Blob Storage is the one that can be compared with Amazon S3 and as its name suggests designed to store binary data. Obviously you can store the files of different types in the storage like this.

How CloudBerry Explorer supports Azure Blob Storage

First, you register account same way. We will have a separate post on how to obtain the account.

Once you register your account you can do usual file operations such create containers, folders, copy/move files between Azure Blob storage and your local computers. You can also copy files between two Azure Blob storage accounts.

Note: when you copy files between different accounts they go through your local computer.

Feature list

* Register and connect to any number of Microsoft Azure Blob Storage accounts

* Work with any number of Microsoft Azure Blob Storage accounts simultaneously

* Create, browse, and delete Microsoft Azure Blob Storage files

* Create, browse, and delete folders

* Copy and move files between Microsoft Azure Blob Storage and your local computer

* Manage containers and blobs

* Create Blob containers

* List blob containers

* Delete Container

* Upload/ Download blobs

* Copy/ Move blobs

* Delete blobs

* Rename blobs

* Veiw blobs

* Blob metadata

* Signed URL for blobs

* Ability to split blobs into multiple blocks View files properties

* Copy/Move in background

* Synchronize folders

* Copy files from Windows Explorer

* Remember user settings

* Built-in feedback form

* Automated check for updates

What’s next

As always we are going to gather user feedback and incorporate it into the product before final release. This is just a short list of things that we have on our list.

1. Support for $root container

2. Support for Conditional headers

3. Support for ACL editing

4. Support for Server timeouts

5. Support for Metadata for containers and blobs

We are also going to implement a PowerShell interface for Azure Blob storage to help users automate their routine tasks.

There are even more exciting features coming. Stay tuned!

CloudBerry Explorer for Azure is a freeware program, it is currently in beta and you can download it at http://www.cloudberrylab.com/default.aspx?page=explorer-azure

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

How to protect Amazon S3 accounts with master password using CloudBerry S3 Explorer

Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer 1.6.3 and later.

In this post we would like to introduce our new Master Password feature that protects CloudBerry S3 Explorer from authorized access. Although rarely these days some users still work on shared computers where other users have access to their data. Master Password helps you further protect your Amazon S3 account from unauthorized access.

To enable Master Password go to the Options screen, General tab. Click protect my sensitive data with master password option and enter the password.

Next time you run CloudBerry Explorer it will ask you to enter the password.

As simple as that. We hope you will find it useful and as always we look forward to your feedback.

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/

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

Introducing CloudBerry Explorer for Nirvanix

We are increasing the breadth of cloud storage support and we are proud to announce CloudBerry Explorer for Nirvanix Storage Area Network the first product in the series.

What is Nirvanix?

Basically Nirvanix is another cloud storage platform, featuring pay as you use model with no commitment and upfront costs. There are a few important differences however. First, Nirvanix guarantees up to 100% (!) availability and it is up to you to select the SLA that works for your business.

One of the features that caught my eye in Nirvanix is the ability to create child accounts within your master storage account. Furthermore, you can set storage and transfer quotas to every child account effectively controlling who is using what in your organization.

Another feature that I think is just great is an ability to do chunked uploads. Many CloudBerry Explore customers complained that uploading large files failed in the middle because of the connection outage and they had to start all over. In Nirvanix you have the ability to continue exactly where you left off and you don’t have to start copying large file again.

How CloudBerry Explorer supports Nirvanix

First, you register account same way. We will have a separate post on how to obtain the account and Application Key.

Once you register your account you can do usual file operations such create folders, copy/move files between Nirvanix storage and your local computers. You can also copy files between two Nirvanix accounts including between Master Account and Child Accounts.

Create Child Accounts

Set up child account quotas

Note that you can login to Nirvanix storage using CloudBerry Explorer with your child account.

What’s next

One thing that have been left over in the first beta release is that ability to share your data. This is going to become available in beta 2. As always we are going to gather user feedback and incorporate it into the product before final release.

We are also going to implement a PowerShell interface for Nirvanix storage to help users automate their routine tasks.

There are even more exciting features coming. Stay tuned!

CloudBerry Explorer for Nirvanix is a windows program, it is currently in beta and you can download it at http://www.cloudberrylab.com/default.aspx?page=explorer-nx

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

How to sync local folder with Amazon S3 bucket with CloudBerry S3 Explorer

Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer 1.6.3 and later.

As always we are adding features that our customers are requesting. This time we decided to add an ability to synchronize the content of your local folder with Amazon S3 bucket. In other words now you can configure make sure the files on your local computer are identical to those in your Amazon S3 storage account. This might be helpful when you want to upload the recent copies of your local files to S3

How to configure synchronization?

First of all we have a new item in the program menu that will help you find the new feature easily.

Click Add Sync Folder to open a configuration dialog. In the opened dialog just enter display name, which is anything you want and will help reference the synchronization later. Choose the source and the target and select the path. Note that your currently selected folders on the left and on the right panel are taken automatically. The source can be a local computer or S3. Currently you can’t sync between S3 accounts but this is something we will add later.

If you are not happy with the selection just click the “…” button to browse the folder. You can browse local folders

… and your Amazon S3 storage account

How to synchronize the folder?

To sync the folders just go to the same program menu, choose the folder you want to sync and one of the options available as shown on the screen. As you can see you can

• Sync Left to Right
• Sync Right to Left
• Sync both ways

The panel at the bottom of the screen will show you the synchronization progress

Looking ahead

Currently you can only manually synchronize the folders. In the future we will add the ability to specify a synchronization schedule. As always we are looking for your feedback and we are eager to improve the feature to make it work better for you!

Conclusion

The ability to sync the content of Amazon S3 bucket with the local folder is a huge productivity boost. No longer do you have to look for modified files and manually select them. CloudBerry Explorer will make it automatically on your behalf!

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/

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

The difference between the request time and the current time is too large

One of the common errors that Amazon S3 users come across is The difference between the requested time and the current time is too large. This error often occurs when your computer clock is not synchronized properly. Amazon returns error code if request doesn't come in a certain time interval.

We recommend to make sure your computer clock are set properly and http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/ can help. After synchronizing computer clock the error is usually gone.

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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/

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

How to manage parallel data upload with CloudBerry S3 Explorer PRO

Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer PRO 1.6.2 and later.

CloudBerry Explorer PRO 1.6 for Amazon S3 that came out about two weeks ago had one drawback. It was not easy for an average user to configure the number of threads used to transfer data to S3 easily. You had to edit the configuration file as explained in our previous post.

CloudBerry Lab team was quick to recognize the problem and make the fix. Now you can control the number of threads in the GUI. Just go to Tools| Options| Connection tab. You can change the Queue thread count to whatever value work for you. The default is 5 (was 2 in the previous release). Our test and our customers’ tests indicated that this value is about right. One of the customers told us that the transfer that used to take more than 3 days now takes less than 24 hours!

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.