Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Backup 1.6 and later.
CloudBerry S3 Backup is a powerful Windows backup and restore program that automate backup and restore processes to Amazon S3 cloud storage.
Ever since we introduced a Reduced Redundancy Storage support in the version 1.5 we realized that it is inconvenient to set up storage class on the account level. It is much more reasonable to configure it on the backup plan level. In the newer release you can decide if you want to use RRS on the plan level and we added an appropriate option to the Compression and Encryption step.
Now, you can have several backup plans with different storage classes. For example, one with standard storage class for the data that under no account you can lose and another one with RRS storage class with the less important data.
Note: In the current version only newly copied data will assume the new storage class. In the future version we are going to add an ability to modify storage class for existing data.
As always we would be happy to hear your feedback and you are welcome to post a comment.
Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Backup 1.6 and later.
CloudBerry S3 Backup is a powerful Windows backup and restore that automate backup and restore processes to Amazon S3 cloud storage.
Awhile back we introduced an option to delete files automatically from the backup storage when they are deleted locally. We added this feature to match increasing number of requests from our customers. However, this option is dangerous in that you can still delete a file accidently on the local computer you won’t be able to recover from it as the file is deleted automatically from the backup storage too.
In the release 1.6 we are introducing a Smart Delete option that will keep files deleted locally on backup storage for 30 days by default and only after that will it delete the files on backup storage. Here is a new option in the Backup Wizard
When you have files scheduled to be deleted you will get a notification on the Welcome Screen
You should click on the Warning link to open a window with the list of files to be deleted where you can decide what to do with the files: delete or preserve.
You will also be getting an additional alert in the notification email advising on the objects scheduled to be deleted.
We hope Smart Delete will improve your experience with our product and make you feel more confident about your data. As always we would be happy to hear your feedback and you are welcome to post a comment.
Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Backup 1.6 and later.
CloudBerry S3 Backup is a powerful Windows backup and restore that automate backup and restore processes to Amazon S3 cloud storage.
An ability to back up network locations is a feature that has been coming up during conversation with our customers over and over.The most common use case is a need to backup Network Attached Storage (NAS) or an external hard drive. With the release 1.6 we are introducing this option to CloudBerry Backup.
Backup Wizard’s source step has been extended with “Add network share” option. When you click on it a new window will pop-up where you will be able to specify a network share.
Note: you might need to configure an account with network access for CloudBerry Backup service.By default the service is running under local system account without network access.
On the the Backup Wizard’s Scheduling step when you schedule CloudBerry Backup to run on a recurring basis you will see an option to specify a service account.
Click to the change the account link to open account dialog box and specify the account with an access to the file share you want to back up.
Note: Using CloudBerry Backup Desktop Edition you can backup one share at a time. If you want to be able to back up multiple network locations you will have to use CloudBerry Backup Server Edition.This new version of CloudBerry Backup runs on the server version of Windows operating system such as Windows 2003 and Windows 2008.
As always we would be happy to hear your feedback and you are welcome to post a comment.
Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer 2.2 and later.
As always we are trying to stay on top of the new functionality offered by Amazon S3to offer the most compelling Amazon S3 and CloudFront client on Windows platform.
Bucket Policy is a new Amazon S3 feature that allowscustomers to author policies which either grant or deny access to any number of accounts and across a range or set of keys.In our previous blog post we explained how you can leverage CloudBerry Explorer for managing Bucket Policies.
In this blog post we would like to discuss a single option that makes Bucket Policy a very powerful tool to protect your media content hosted on Amazon S3. Bucket policy allows you to restrict which website can link your content effectively preventing hotlinking.
This is important not only because you might want to protect your copyright, but also because hotlinking may cause excessive Amazon S3 transfer fee. Remember, you have to pay each time someone downloads an image.
Let’s see how you can leverage Bucket Policy to prevent hotlinking. Say you have a bucket called mybucket where you keep your public images (or any other media content for that matter)
Our goal is to configure the bucket in such a way that no other website can link our images.
1. make sure you don’t have ACL Public Read on any files in mybucketbucket.
2. on the mybucket bucket set up a Policy that will allow all user read the files in the bucket provided that a request is coming from cloudberrylab.com
Here is an example of the policy that will enforce the rule above. You can simply copy it to the policy editor in CloudBerry S3 Explorer PRO modifying the Resource and aws:Referer clauses.
{ "Version":"2008-10-17", "Id":"http referer policy example", "Statement":[ { "Sid":"Allow get requests referred by www.cloudberrylab.com, cloudberrylab.com and IP address", "Effect":"Allow", "Principal":"*", "Action":"s3:GetObject", "Resource":"arn:aws:s3:::mybucket/*", "Condition":{ "StringLike":{ "aws:Referer":[ "http://www.cloudberrylab.com/*", "http://cloudberrylab.com/*", "http://74.208.197.105/*"
] } } } ] }
The most important element here is the aws:Referer clause
In aws:Referer clause you have to specify all domain names and IP addresses the website is available from. In many cases you will need only to specify just one domain name.
As always we would be happy to hear your feedback and you are welcome to post a comment.
Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Backup 1.6 and later.
CloudBerry S3 Backup is a powerful Windows backup and restore that automate backup and restore processes to Amazon S3 cloud storage.
An ability to back up network locations is a feature that has been coming up during conversation with our customers over and over.The most common use case is a need to backup Network Attached Storage (NAS) or an external hard drive. With the release 1.6 we are introducing this option to CloudBerry Backup.
Awhile back we introduced an option to delete files automatically from the backup storage when they are deleted locally. However, this option is dangerous in that you can still delete a file accidentally on the local computer you won’t be able to recover from it as the file is deleted automatically from the backup storage too.
In the release 1.6 we are introducing a Smart Delete option that will keep files deleted locally on backup storage for 30 days by default and only after that will it delete the files on backup storage.
Besides, with the release 1.6 we are introducing CloudBerry Backup Server Edition.This new version of CloudBerry Backup ($59.99) is designed to run on the server version of Windows operating system such as Windows 2003 and Windows 2008. All existing Cloud Berry Backup customers running the product on servers are eligible for free upgrade.
And finally, in the release 1.6 we have modified that way how you can configure RRS storage option with CloudBerry Backup. In the previous release you had to specify RRS option for the whole account level. This turns out to be inflexible and in the newer release we moved RRS configuration to the Backup Wizard and you can now configure RRS option on the backup plan level.
We are going to blog about each of the new feature is greater details. Stay tuned.
As always we would be happy to hear your feedback and you are welcome to post a comment.
Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer 2.2.3 and later.
As always we are trying to stay on top of the new functionality offered by Amazon S3to offer the most compelling Amazon S3 and CloudFront client on Windows platform.
Notification of Lost Objects is a new feature that enables users to have notifications sent to an Amazon Simple Notification Service. Amazon S3 is now integrated with Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS). You can configure your bucket to send a notification, via SNS, when an RRS object in that bucket is lost.(Check out here on how to enable RRS using CloudBerry Explorer). Notifications are enabled on a bucket level similar to the server logging and versioning.
Newer release of CloudBerry Explorer allows you to turn on notification of lost objects, retrieve current notification settings for a bucket and disable notification, all using convenient user interface.
The new option can be found in the bucket level context menu.
It opens up a dialog that combines other RRS related options.
Discussion of Amazon Simple Notification Service is outside of the scope of this article and doesn’t fall into the area of CloudBerry Lab expertise. You can learn more about this service here. You can create a Topic using a Command Line Interface Tool for Amazon Simple Notification Service. The description of the tool is available here http://awsdocs.s3.amazonaws.com/SNS/latest/sns-gsg.pdf
As always we would be happy to hear your feedback and you are welcome to post a comment.
Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer PRO 2.2.2 and later.
As always we are trying to stay on top of the new functionality offered by Amazon S3to offer the most compelling Amazon S3 and CloudFront client on Windows platform.
Bucket Policy is a new Amazon S3 feature that allowscustomers to author policies which either grant or deny access to any number of accounts and across a range or set of keys.
In the initial release of bucket policies only the bucket owner has the privilege to PUT a policy on their bucket.There can also only be one policy attached to the bucket.Finally, there is a limit of 20K for the size of an individual policy.
New version of CloudBerry Explorer supports creating Bucket Policies. Select the bucket and choose Bucket Policy in the context menu.
As always we would be happy to hear your feedback and you are welcome to post a comment. In particular we would like to know if you want a visual policy designer that will hide a complexity of the script while allowing you to create policies using drag and drop toolbox.
Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer 2.1 and later.
As always we are adding features that our customers are requesting. We got quite some feedback from our customers on our policy to expire the freeware version every three months.Even though we just wanted our customers to stay on the most recent version of the software many customers found it inconvenient and even distracting.
As of version 2.1 the freeware version doesn’t expire and you can use it for as long you like. Until for example AWS S3 console becomes mature enough and you don’t need a 3rd party product any more.
However, we would like to take this opportunity to tell you that it is highly recommended that you regularly upgrade to the most recent version of the software. Automated check for updates feature will tell you when the new version becomes available. Believe it or not with each version we fix some 100 issues, besides adding new exciting functionality to the product and it well worth upgrading.
As always we would be happy to hear your feedback and you are welcome to post a comment.
One thing that has been causing some pain for the users is inability to delete the whole bucket contents under some circumstances where versioning was on. We tracked down the issue and found out that we didn’t handle deleted folders correctly. This issue is actively discussed on S3 forum.
Another thing is that our freeware customers had no way to see versioned objects in their buckets.
Anyways, we have collected the feedback and added quite a few enhancements to CloudBerry Explorer. Among those is an ability to show deleted folders, show deleted/ versioned objects in the freeware, show versions for multiple selected objects and delete the content of the whole bucket with versioned objects.
View deleted folders
Deleted folders are shown in the main list grayed and you can see them in the bottom list. Make sure you turn on “show deleted versions” option on. You can find this option in Tools->Options->Versioning
View versions in the freeware
As of release 2.2.1 you will be able to view object versions in the freeware version of CloudBerry Explorer. You will have exactly the same experience as in PRO version. It is just that you will not be able to delete and restore individual versions. You can always grab the 15 days free trial of CloudBerry Explorer PRO to do that if you need.
Show versions for Multiple Objects
Notice how I selected to objects in the top panel and you can see all version to all selected objects in the bottom panel.
Delete bucket with versions
This is actually more than just deleting versions. We’re introducing an efficient way to delete the whole bucket with all objects inside it. Sometimes you need to delete the whole bucket with a lot of content and you don’t want to delete each object separately as it is a very time consuming operation. On the other hand you don’t want to go inside the bucket, list all objects and multi select them. This is also not the most efficient way to delete the content.
Now you can just select the bucket and delete it. You will get a warning message such as the one shown below. Just click ok if you are ready to proceed.
Needless to say that you should use this option with extreme caution as there is no way to recover the objects later.
We hope you like our enhancements and we will be happy to hear your feedback. Please post your comment to our blog and we will award the best suggestion with a free license of CloudBerry Explorer PRO.
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