Introducing CloudBerry Explorer for Google Storage

Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer for Google Storage 1.0 and later.

Google Storage for Developers is a RESTful service for storing and accessing your data on Google's infrastructure. The service combines the performance and scalability of Google's cloud with advanced security and sharing capabilities.

Following the Google’s announcement CloudBerry Lab decided to support Google Storage in their CloudBerry Explorer product line. CloudBerry Explorer for Google Storage will have all of the functionality of CloudBerry S3 Explorer taking into account Google Storage specifics.

Google Storage is currently in private beta but if you are one of those lucky individuals who got an invitation you can now work with your storage using CloudBerry Explorer.

Note: CloudBerry Explorer for Google Storage is currently in beta.

You get your Access and Secret key on the Key Management section of Google Storage website:

You register your Google Storage account in exactly the same way as you register Amazon S3 accounts.

Now you can enjoy one of the many features of Google Storage:

* Register and connect to any number of Google Storage accounts

* Work with any number of Google Storage accounts simultaneously

* Create, browse, and delete Google Storage files

* Create, browse, and delete folders

* Copy and move files between Google Storage and your local computer

* Create Buckets

* List Buckets

* Delete Buckets

* Upload/ Download files

* Copy/ Move files

* Delete files

* Rename files

* View files

* Generate URL for files

* 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

In addition to CloudBerry Explorer, CloudBerry Backup will also have a version designed for Google Storage. Stay tuned!

CloudBerry Explorer for Google Storage is a Windows freeware product that helps managing Google Storage. You can download it at http://www.cloudberrylab.com/default.aspx?page=explorer-gs

CloudBerry Explorer PRO for Google Storage is a Windows program that helps managing Google Storage. You can download it at http://www.cloudberrylab.com/default.aspx?page=explorer-gs-pro It is priced at $39.99 .

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CloudBerry Backup for Amazon S3: Introducing Simple Mode

Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Backup 1.5 beta and later.

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

One of the unique features of CloudBerry Backup is that you can access your backup storage using other Amazon S3 clients. In other words you don’t need CloudBerry Backup client to access your data. This is possible firstly because we leverage Amazon S3 as our backup storage and users have their own Amazon S3 accounts. However, even though you could access your files the file structure was a kind of weird. There is always a balancing act between open data format and advanced features such as compression, encryption, versioning and chucking (that helps us to resume broken uploads)

As a part of our effort to maintain an open data format and make what works best for our customers in the version 1.5 we are introducing the Simple Mode.

Simple Mode will allow you to create a data structure on your Amazon S3 storage that completely mirrors the data structure on your local disk. There will be no wired folders and you can access your data with other Amazon S3 client such as S3 Fox, S3Hub (Mac), CloudBerry Explorer freeware

Everything comes at the price however; with simple mode you will lose an ability to encrypt data, upload files larger than 5 GB and resume failed uploads in the middle. We keep an option to compress data in Simple Mode though.

The next release of CloudBerry Backup will also leverage Amazon S3 versioning feature to make backup even more transparent.

Overall, we are strongly committed to make our data storage format as open as possible and leverage as many features as Amazon platform as we can. Amazon S3 is developing at a rapid pace and with an addition of the ability to resume broken uploads in the middle and removing the limitation of 5GB files we will be able to offer the most simple and open backup storage for our users. As the result we are hope to offer only Simple Mode backup sometime in the future.

Other new features include support for Asia Pacific region and support for reduced redundancy storage that allows you pay 33% less in exchange for insignificant durability loss.

One last note: We will be releasing an open source tool that will help our users to extract data from their Amazon S3 account in case if they used Advanced Mode with encryption and chunking features. Not only will it make our customers feel safer, but also it will help developers to access data programmatically.

We are excited about new open data format and we are soliciting feedback on it. Please let us know what you think in the comments on this blog and we will be granting free licenses for the first 5 readers.

CloudBerry Backup is a Windows program that leverages Amazon S3 storage. You can download it at http://cloudberrydrive.com/ . It comes with onetime fee of $29.99 (US) per copy. The version for Windows Home Server is also available.

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How to use Amazon S3 Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) with CloudBerry Explorer

Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer PRO 2.1 and later.

AWS Multi-Factor Authentication (AWS MFA) is an additional layer of security that offers enhanced control over your AWS account settings. It is an opt-in account feature that requires a valid six-digit, single-use code from an authentication device in your physical possession in addition to your standard AWS account credentials before access is granted to your AWS account settings.

You can use AWS MFA in conjunction with Amazon S3’s Versioning capability for additional protection of your Amazon S3 stored versions. Newer version of CloudBerry Explorer PRO comes with MFA support for object delete operations.

Configuring CloudBerry Explorer to use MFA

First, you have to save MFA Serial Number along with the account detail. Make sure that this MFA device is already associated with your account on AWS Portal.

Click Specify MFA serial number link on the account detail dialog

Enter the MFA Serial number.

Check out the label on your device to find out the Serial number

Configuring bucket to use MFA

Go to the Versioning tab of the property window for the bucket you want to enable MFA. Check Enable MFA delete option. When you click apply or ok button you will see a dialog box asking you provide 6-digit code from your device. Once you enter correct code the MFA delete is on for this bucket.

How to delete object versions when MFA is on

MFA is used to protect delete versions operations from unauthorized and unintended use so that it doesn’t get deleted accidently. When you delete a version it will pop up a dialog where you have to enter a 6-digit code from your device. If you fail to provide correct code you will not be able to finish the operation.

Conclusion

We hope you will find MFA delete support in CloudBerry Explorer PRO useful and it will make you feel more confident about your data security.

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://pro.cloudberrylab.com/ It is priced at $39.99

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

How to configure Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) with CloudBerry Explorer

Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer 2.1 and later.

Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) enables users to store data in S3 at a 33% discount to our standard pricing in return for a reduced level of durability. Amazon S3 stores objects according to their storage class, which is assigned when an object is written.

Newer version of CloudBerry Explorer allows users to take advantage of RSS by specifying appropriate object class. Just select the bucket and choose Bucket Defaults from the context menu. Turn Use Reduced Redundancy Storage on as you can see on the screen below.

As it states on the screen this storage class will be applied only to the newly copied objects, the existing objects will have their storage class intact.

Important Note: RRS class will only apply automatically if you copy the files over using CloudBerry Explorer. It has no effect on other tools or APIs.

How to update storage class for existing objects in a bucket

To update the storage class for an object you have to set an x-amz-storage-class http header.
Valid values:
REDUCED_REDUNDANCY
STANDARD

To apply the header select the objects and click Set HTTP Headers in the context menu.

Click Add and type x-amz-storage-class for Http Header and REDUCED_REDUNDANCY for Value as shown below. The values are case sensitive. Click ok and ok to close the Set HTTP Headers dialog.

Note: After applying this header you won't see it next time you request for file headers.

Check out this blog post on detailed instruction on applying http headers using CloudBerry Explorer.

How to check a storage class for existing objects in a bucket

In version 2.2 you will be able to view the storage class for existing objects by looking into its properties. Look for the Storage Class attribute.

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://pro.cloudberrylab.com/ It is priced at $39.99

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

How to configure Amazon CloudFront Streaming log with CloudBerry Explorer

Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer 2.1 and later.

Amazon CloudFront has been offering access logs for HTTP distributions for quite some time. Now this feature is extended to work with streaming distributions as well. Amazon team has designed CloudFront access logs for streaming to work in a very similar fashion to the existing access logs for HTTP distributions.

Access logs for streaming will, however, have a different record layout that reflects the different nature of streaming delivery. Each record in a streaming access log will represent a distinct playback event – connect, play, pause, stop, disconnect and so on. So, each time one of your viewers watches a video, you’ll see multiple records in your access logs.

CloudBerry Explorer has been supporting Amazon S3 server access logging and CloudFront access logging from a long time. Following the recent announcement CloudBerry Explorer added a support for enabling CloudFront logging and generating simple reports.

To turn this option on simply go to Streaming Distribution properties, Logging tab and choose Use logging option. Select the bucket and prefix where you want the log files to be written.

Enabling logging is only half of the deal as you can imagine and once log files come to the bucket you may want to analyze them. Select the bucket with configured as a streaming distribution and with streaming log enabled. Go to the logging tool bar and choose View Streaming Access Log in the drop down menu.

CloudBerry Explorer comes with a few basic reports that help you get a feel of the information stored in your log files. Here is an example of the log file in the tabular format.

Another important feature related to log files is that CloudBerry Explorer PRO improves the performance of the log files by allowing for maintaining a local cache. You can notice a significant performance improvement when working with built-in CloudBerry Explorer reports and charts.

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://pro.cloudberrylab.com/ It is priced at $39.99

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