CloudBerry Explorer for Google Storage: Sharing with Groups

Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer for Google Storage 1.1 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. Recently Google added a capability to share with groups, giving you greater flexibility over how you share your data.

Following the Google’s announcement CloudBerry Lab added a support for sharing with groups in their CloudBerry Explorer.

To share content with a group select a bucket, folder or a file you want to share and click ACL Settings button on the toolbar or on the context menu. You will see an ACL Editor screen like the one below.

Click Add button. Enter the email address of the group and make sure you select the group radio button. Click ok.

You will see the new group in the list. Grant the control type you want for this group (Full Control or Read). If you want the permission to propagate to all files and folders in a bucket check Apply for all subfolders and files option. Click ok.

By now all the members of the group should have a required access to your data. If you are wondering who to create a Google Group you should go to http://groups.google.com/ and create a group. This is just a Google discuss group and you can add anyone with a Google account to it.

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 for Google Storage PRO is a Windows program that helps managing Google Storage. You can download it at http://cloudberrylab.com/default.aspx?page=explorer-gs-pro and buy it at the introductory price of $15 (regular price is $39.99)

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How to create signed URLs with PowerShell and CloudBerry S3 Explorer

Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer 1.9.1 and later.

Every so often you may want to automate generating signed URLs for Amazon S3 or CloudFront and CloudBerry Explorer PowerShell command line interface provides you with an option to do just that. .

Generating Web URLs
Using Get-CloudUrl command you can generate HTTP, HTTPS or RTMP URLs and also HTML code for streaming video files.

EXAMPLE 1: Generating short URL for JPG files and save output to a file

$dest | Get-CloudUrl -Filter *.jpg -Type HTTP -ChilpIt >> C:\urls.txt

EXAMPLE 2: Generating signed URL

$dest | Get-CloudUrl -Filter *.jpg -Type HTTPS -Expire 01/01/2011 >> C:\urls.txt

EXAMPLE 3: Generating CloudFront signed URL (where $domain is a CloudFront distribution domain name)

$dest | Get-CloudUrl -Filter *.jpg -Type HTTP -Expire 01/01/2011 -DomainName $domain>> C:\urls.txt

EXAMPLE 4: Generate signed URL for private content item (where $domain is Streaming distribution domain name)

$policy = New-CloudPolicy -PrivateKey $privatekey -KeyPairId $keypairid -IsCanned
$dest | Get-CloudUrl -Filter *.flv -Type RTMP -Policy $policy -Expire 01/01/2011 -DomainName $domain >> C:\urls.txt

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

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CloudBerry S3 Explorer: Improved Reduced Redundancy Storage support.

Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer 2.2 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.

Since we added RRS support to CloudBerry Explorer in version 2.1 we got a lot of feedback from our customers who wanted to make it even easier to apply RRS storage class to their files. Newer release of CloudBerry Explorer adds some usability enhancements to RRS support including displaying storage class in the object list, setting storage class one click operation and displaying storage class in the properties screen.

First, you can now see the Storage Class in the object list panel. It doesn’t add up anything to the transfer costs as the storage class is returned by LIST operation. This feature is available in both freeware and PRO versions.

Second, you can now view Storage Class using object properties. Again, this feature is available in both freeware and PRO versions.

And finally, in the PRO version you can easily apply Storage Class to your object (s) by using the context menu.

We hope these enhancements will make it even easier and you keep using CloudBerry Explorer and prefer 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://pro.cloudberrylab.com/ It is priced at $39.99

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Introducing CloudBerry Backup for Windows Azure Blob Storage

Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Backup for Azure 1.5.1 and later.

CloudBerry S3 Backup is a powerful Windows backup and restore that automate backup and restore processes to Amazon S3 cloud storage. With release 1.5 we introduce support for Windows Azure Blob Storage accounts.

CloudBerry Backup for Windows Azure has exactly the same feature set as CloudBerry S3 Backup:

Features:

• Easy installation and configuration
• Scheduling capabilities
• Data encryption
• Data retention schedule
• Secure online storage
• Data versioning
• Differential backup
• The ability to restore to a particular date
• Backup verification
• Alerting notifications
• Backup Window
• Backup exclusively locked files using Volume Shadow Copy
• Parallel data transfer - speed up backup/restore process
• Command Line interface - integrate backup with your own routines
• C# API - an ability to get backup plan statistics programatically
• Scheduling service. No dependency on Windows Task Scheduler
• The version specifically designed for Windows Home Server

If you don’t have an account registers yet you should register it as shown on the screen below. If you are an existing CloudBerry Explorer for Azure customer you will be able to import your existing accounts.

The rest works just as if you were using Amazon S3.

Special offer for beta testers

CloudBerry Backup for Azure is free while in beta. All beta users will get a free license when the product is released. To claim your free license in the future you will need to register your copy.

Why use Windows Azure?

Advantage and disadvantages of Azure Blob storage is well outside of the scope of this article, but one thing we want to mention here. Azure storage comes with a built-in chunking mechanism. In other words, it will break down larger files into smaller chunks for you to make an upload more reliable and then it will automatically combine a file once all chunks reach the storage.

What’s next?

In the coming release of CloudBerry Backup for Azure we are planning to support page blobs. To make a long story short I will just say that these types of blobs allow you to modify only a given portion of the blob. This will allow us to implement a block level (or differential) backup relatively easy. Once this feature is in place you will be able to back up large files such as Outlook PST files, MS SQL Server backup files, MS Exchange Data files and Intuit databases in a very efficient manner. You will not have to re-upload the whole file but only the modified portion saving on upload time and transfer costs.

CloudBerry Backup for Azure is a Windows program that leverages Azure Blob storage. You can download it at http://cloudberrylab.com/default.aspx?page=backup-az . It comes with onetime fee of $29.99 (US) per copy (currently free while in beta).

AWS Console with S3 Support: Do you still need CloudBerry Explorer?

As most of you know Amazon team has released added an S3 support to AWS Management Console. This raises a logical question: Do I still need CloudBerry Explorer to manage my Amazon S3 account? The answer would be it depends. Honestly, if you just want to upload a few files to S3 every once in a while and do some basic configuration, AWS console is all you need.

Among the obvious advantages of AWS Console are
1) access to the console everywhere in the world provided you have an internet access
2) log in to the console using your username and password - no need for access key id and security access key.
3) works on Windows, Mac and Linux
4) support for MFA log-in


However, if you are a more heavy user of Amazon S3, CloudFront and Import/ Export service you are probably need something more sophisticated and CloudBerry Explorer might still be a good choice depending on your needs. In the table below we are giving a feature by feature comparison among some of the most popular Amazon S3 management tools to demonstrate how CloudBerry Explorer adds value to S3 Management Console.

We also like to make a statement that we are committed to further improving the product in the future. We have a solid product road map and you will see a lot of new and exciting features moving forward.

Features	CloudBerry Explorer	S3Fox	AWS Console
Operating System	Microsoft Windows	Microsoft Windows, Linux and Mac OS X	Any (web application)
Premium Support	Available, 48 Hour Resolution Guaranteed	-	S3 Forum or premium support (paid)
Versioning Support		-	-
MFA delete for wersioning		-	-
CloudFront Support
CloudFront Private Content		-	-
CloudFront Steaming		-	-
CloudFront HTTPS support		-	-
Windows PowerShell Support		-	-
Generate External URLs
FLV Encoder Support for S3		-	-
Auto-Update to new version			Not applicable
Protect program with Master Password		-	not applicable
Supported URL Formats	HTTP, HTTPS and RTMP	HTTP	HTTP, HTTPS
CNAME Support
Drag and Drop			-
Register multiple accounts
Browse S3 Buckets
Upload file size	5 GB and more with chunking	less than 5 GB	Less than 300 MB
Copy Files between S3 accounts		-	-
External (Shared) buckets		-	-
Scheduling		-	-
Instant Bucket Copying
Modify Access Control Policy
Propogate Access Control Policy		-	-
Enable S3/ CloudFront log		-
S3 / CloudFront log viewer		-	-
AWS Import/ Export support (email)			-
AWS Import/ Export support (API)		-	-
Compare buckets		-	-
Sync buckets		basic	-
Eucalyptus/ Walrus support		-	-
Encryption	PRO only	-	-
Compression	PRO only	-	-
FTP support	PRO only	-	-

Source

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

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