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/

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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.

CloudBerry S3 Explorer supports AWS Import / Export.

Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer 1.7.1 and later.

AWS Import is another Amazon service that allows you to ship a hard drive to Amazon to import your data to Amazon S3. On the other hand with AWS Export you ship your hard drive to Amazon so that they copy your data from Amazon S3 account and ship the hard drive back to you with your data on it. Needless to say if you want to transfer many GB or even TB of data the service is very compelling as it can significantly speed things up. AWS Import/ Export is currently in public beta and you can find more about it (including pricing and supported devices) here

CloudBerry S3 Explorer 1.7.1 and later helps you to configure the whole process with easy to use wizard. New version of CloudBerry Explorer automates the process of creating the manifest file and digitally signing it along with the job identifier with your AWS Secret Access Key and placing that signature file on the device.

You get a new item in the program menu that allows you to run the Wizards.

And here is how AWS Import Wizard looks like:

We are going to make another post in the future explaining the whole process in more details. 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/

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

CloudBerry S3 Explorer now with US-West support

Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer 1.7.1 and later.

Just a few days ago Amazon S3 team announced the availability of the new data center in Northern California region. CloudBerry Lab team has been quick to respond and has added support for US-West region to CloudBerry S3 Explorer freeware and PRO.

Basically you have a new option when are creating a new bucket you have an option to create it in US-West region.

Amazon is planning on expanding their data centers to Asia next year and CloudBerry lab is also going to support new regions.

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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.

How to send diagnostic info with CloudBerry Backup

In CloudBerry Lab we are striving to make our customer service better. In this competitive market with the abundance of free offerings this is the only way to stay afloat. One of the ways to keep customers happy is to be very responsive when it comes to support request resolution. Should you delay the request and the customer will turn to a competitor.

Sometimes it takes a lot of time to understand what the issue is and what caused it. This is very diagnostic log helps dramatically. In the new version of CloudBerry Backup we made it even easier to send us the diagnostic information.

How to report that my backup plan failed

In CloudBerry Backup we made it extremely easy to report on the failed Backup Plan. If your Backup Plan failed to run you will get a link that says Report an issue. If you click on it you will get the dialog that will help you easily send the diagnostic information to CloudBerry Lab support

Here you can explain what the issue to help us a little more. Finally you have an option to post the message to our discussion forum at http://www.cloudberrylab.com/forum/default.aspx so that other CloudBerry Lab users benefit from the resolution too.

Now click Send button and the log files along with your message will be automatically transferred to our web service.

What if I have other issues?

Just go to Tools| Diagnostics and you will get this window

Now click Send button and you will get the Feedback screen where you can explain the issue and send the log files to CloudBerry Lab support just like explained above.

Alert Notification

We are constantly getting requests from our customers to add an ability to send email notification when a Backup Plan completed with errors. We are going to add this ability in the next maintenance release and we will also have an option to send diagnostic information to CloudBerry lab so that we can start investigating the issue immediately.

If you came to this post by chance you should know that CloudBerry Backup is a Windows product that helps automate date backup and restore to Amazon S3 cloud storage. You can download it at http://cloudberrydrive.com/

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