Lesson Fifteen

In this video, we’re going to cover managing your Amazon S3 files using Bucket Explorer.

First off, go ahead and open up bucket explorer and if you haven’t done so yet, go ahead and enter your access key, secret key and give it a name, but we’ve done this already as we’ve shown in a prior video, so I’m just going to come over here to the right and click on quick connect and then select one of the accounts that I’ve already connected with in the past. I want to go with Jane’s account and that’s going to hook me up to my S3 account. Let’s go and get this guy out of the way.

Some of these things we’ve covered in the prior videos, like the left side over here is your computer and the various files and folders on your computer and here on the right side is broken up into 2 sections. The top section is your buckets and the tools up here that work with the buckets and below that are the objects and the tools here that work with those objects. Let’s go ahead and select this top bucket here. That will show us some of the objects in that bucket and we did cover in the prior video the uploading or the transferring of files from your computer to your S3 bucket by using the arrows here.

Well you can do the same thing with these objects in transferring them or downloading them to your computer or you can also copy or move them from this location to another bucket of yours or another bucket of somebody else’s account and to do that you would just select the items and you can even do the same thing with selecting multiple items. Just hold the control key down on your keyboard if it’s a PC. I’m not sure what it would be on a Mac, and then you would right click and then come on down here to copy, move and rename and then just click on copy or move.

These 2 functions here, they’re pretty much the same as we had discussed in the Cloudberry S3 Explorer video where copying the files will leave the originals or the source documents while pasting these files on the destination. The move will actually remove them from the source location and paste them on the destination location, but if we do this, let’s say copy, then this big guy here opens up. Let me try to squeeze it down into the video here, and you’ve got the 2 paints here – the source and the destination. Now here you can select from buckets on your account or from somebody else’s account; pretty cool. Again it’s pretty similar to that of Cloudberry S3 Explorer.

A matter of fact, a lot of the features are similar. You just have to find them in different spots. Like for example if I were to select this file here and then come on up here to batch operations and click on that, I can go to update metadata and then select add, edit or delete that metadata and if we select on edit then we get this other window eventually that pops up where here we can add, remove or edit the metadata that’s on that particular file and we kind of touched on getting the URLs, remember we were talking on a prior video on generating the expiring URL but just to kind of rehash that, if we select the item that we want to get the URL for, then come on up here and click on web URL. This generates the source and the default. If in fact the default URL is what is selected over here in the URL format and, let’s exit out of this, you can do the same thing for multiple files at the same time and here they are.

At this point all you have to do is click on copy URLs and they’ll put the default URL or the bottom URL or whatever URL format you choose, it will put that in your computers clipboard where you can paste it anywhere you want.

As far as editing the permissions, pretty much the same thing holds true with the files and the buckets. With the buckets and the folders, as I had mentioned in an earlier video, I suggest highly to leave those permissions alone at the default private. That’s super secure but if you find the need to adjust either the permissions on the individual files, folders or buckets, you can do that by the ACLs; whether it’s the buckets up here, you need to go with the ACLs here or the files or objects down here, you go with the ACLs here and you can do that with single files or select multiple files. This guy pops up and you just select whatever permission that you want to adjust.

For example if you want to make it public or f you want to make it private if it’s already public. Whatever change you make, be sure to click on update ACL. I’m going to go ahead and cancel out of here.

As far as automatically moving your buckets or files into the cold storage or glacier storage format or deleting them automatically at some future date, which is called life cycle, you just come on up here and select the bucket that you do this with. I believe it’s under advanced. Yep, object, life cycle. Click on set object life cycle and you’ll get another window that pops up here in a second and here you just go ahead and select whichever you want if you want it to expire at some future date or a number of days from the time in which this bucket is created, then you would select this box, put in the number of days or check this radio button, hit the dropdown arrow and select the date in the future that you want this particular bucket to expire.

If you don’t want it to expire and you want it to be moved into cold storage automatically, then check that box and select this radio button, dropdown arrow, select the future date you want this to be moved into cold storage, which if you recall is just another storage format, only it’s a lot less expensive because you’re not going to be retrieving it on a regular basis, or you can select this one and put in here the number of days from the actual creation date of this particular bucket. I’m going to go ahead and untick this as well.

Before I close out this video, since obviously there is a whole lot of features in here that I have not gone over.

So to find out more about those features, head on over to bucketexplorer.com/be-documentation.html.

At the very top of the page this is going to say ‘expand all.’ Go ahead and click on that, and then any feature or item that you want to learn more about, and hit control F, the find function, and this being Mozilla Firefox, it will show up down here in the lower left corner.

If you’re on a different browser then it might show up up here on the top right corner, but basically you’re going to use this find function to find or search for the topic that you’re wanting to learn more about. For example I was typing in here ‘life’ to find out how to setup the lifecycle. Well as you type, then it’s going to go through and point out all the terms or phrases that match that particular keyword that you’re typing in there as you’re typing it in there, just like this right here.

That’s going to put a wrap on taking a look at managing your Amazon S3 files using Bucket Explorer. Thanks for watching and you have a great day.