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/