Lesson Seven

In the next several videos, we’re going to take a look at third party applications that allow you to manage your Amazon S3 account from your computer’s desktop. This video is going to cover my favorite of these tools called Cloudberry S3 Explorer from Cloudberry Labs. There are many of these types of third party tools but Cloudberry S3 Explorer is one of the few that regularly updates its application and has enough bells and whistles that I could dedicate an entire series of videos just to it but for now we’re just going to cover the setup and connections between S3 Explorer and your S3 account and along with that we’re going to go ahead and create another bucket from within S3 Explorer just to show you how that’s done.

First off we want to head on over to Cloudberrylab.com and since they have several different applications here related to AWS, you might want to spend some time here later on and check some of these other tools out, but for now all that we are interested in is Explorer. Let’s go ahead and click on the Explorer freeware and here’s going to give you a comparison breakdown between the freeware and the pro, which frankly I would suggest you eventually get but all you really need is just the freeware and for that matter you could go ahead and download the pro trial just to kind of kick the tires of all the goodies that the pro has to offer and I think it’s good for 30 days, at which time it will just simply stop working or it will revert to the freeware version and these other features will just stop working, unless you want go ahead and put in the application key that you get whenever you make the purchase.

I also need to say that this is just for the Windows operating system and for you Mac users I’m going to get you covered in the next video whenever we talk about Cyberduck but the installation is pretty straightforward. Just go ahead and download whichever one you want and install it and once it’s installed, let me go ahead and open mine up that’s already been installed, it’s going to look somewhat like this, only yours is going to be empty.

If you’re somewhat familiar with different FTP applications like Filezilla for example, then you’re going to see some similarities here where you’ve got 2 different pings, one might represent your computer, the other one would represent the internet or in this case an S3 account. But right now the way I have it setup, both of these are from my computer, so you can really do this however you like. You get this dropdown arrow here that shows all the different S3 accounts that you have setup. Yes you can have several S3 accounts. As you can see here I’ve got several of them, none of which are the one that we created in a prior video, which is what we’re going to do now.

Let’s go ahead and come over to file, and then in the dropdown click on Amazon S3. Then over here go ahead and click on new account and then click on add. Give it whatever name you want and if you only have 1 S3 account then it doesn’t really matter but if you end up having several, then of course you want to name it something that you know the basic contents you’re going to have within that particular S3 account.

Now you’re going to need the access key and the secret key.