How to backup to external buckets with CloudBerry Backup

Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Backup 1.7 and later.

CloudBerry S3 Backup is a powerful Windows program that automate backup and restore processes to Amazon S3 cloud storage.

In the release 1.7 we are introducing an option to backup to other user “external” buckets. In this case the user only needs to sign up for a free AWS account and not even specify the credit card. The owner of the master account should provide the user with read / write access to a bucket.

This configuration allows to offer a small scale managed backup service for customers or backup space for the small company employees.  All billing goes to the master account and other users who back up their data to external buckets don’t have to care of credit cards.

How to specify an external bucket

The bucket owner will have to provide the users with the name of the bucket. He will also have to make sure the user has read/write access to the bucket to be able to write data to it. Then simply specify an external bucket name on the account configuration dialog.  Open Amazon S3 account in the File | Amazon S3 Accounts menu.  Click Edit account and click Advanced link. Now simply type an external bucket name as shown on the screen.

How to grant another user access to a bucket

First, you need to know an email address the other user signed up for AWS account. It is very same email address you use to login to AWS Portal.

Use CloudBerry Explorer freeware (or PRO).  (you can do that with S3 Fox and AWS Console if you like) Select the bucket and run the ACL Editor.  Click Add and specify a user email address, jeff.smith@yahoo.com in this example. Check off Read and Write and click ok. You have just granted another user access to your bucket.

You can learn more about External buckets in our previous blog post here.

How to get AWS account

Simply login to the AWS portal and register with your email address. You don’t have to sign up for any service such as Amazon S3 if you only want to back up data to the other user “external” buckets and  you don’t have to specify your credit card.

Security Considerations

In the multiuser environment make sure that each user uses their own encryption password to protect the users from inadvertently see each other files. To make it more secure you can create a bucket per user, but remember you can create only up to 100 buckets per S3 account. Anyways, we don’t think this feature will be used to provide backup space for more than 100 users.

If you need a large scale backup service check out our upcoming Managed Backup Service

As always we would be happy to hear your feedback and you are welcome to post a comment.

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CloudBerry Backup is a Windows program that leverages Amazon S3 storage. You can download it at http://backup.cloudberrylab.com/ . It comes with onetime fee of $29.99 (US) per copy.

CloudBerry Backup for WHS is a Windows Home Server add-in that leverages Amazon S3 storage. You can download it at http://whs.cloudberrylab.com/ . It comes with onetime fee of $29.99 (US) per copy.

CloudBerry Backup Server Edition.  is a Windows program designed to run in server environment that leverages Amazon S3 storage. You can download it at http://server.cloudberrylab.com/ . It comes with onetime fee of $59.99 (US) per copy.

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