Lesson TwentyThree

In this video, I’m going to show you how you can gain access to someone else’s Amazon S3 bucket so that you can transfer files or objects from your bucket into theirs.

To help illustrate this better, we’re going to pretend that I’ve got a customer that needs to get some files from me and I’m going to be using 2 AWS accounts to do this. The account that we’ve been using throughout this video series we’re going to use that as the customer’s account and that’s going to be this one here, Joe Demo or Joe D user and the account that’s going to represent me or the main account if you will is the one I have listed as demo 2. This is the email address I use to log in to that account. This is the email address that I use or Joeduser@gmail.com, this is the email address that I use to log in to this account. This is important because the customer, Joe demo, is going to need to create a bucket which they’ve already done and they’re going to need to grant me full permissions on that bucket.

They’ve already done that but let me just show you what I’m talking about here. If we select that bucket and then go into properties and then go to permissions, you can see that they’ve entered my email address and as soon as you click on save and close this up and then open it up again, it’s going to strip out the @gmail.com, so you would enter my full email address her and then full permissions. All the boxes just make sure they’re all ticked and then come down here and click on save. That is all that we need from the customer.

As a matter of fact at this point you would tell the customer that after they’ve created the bucket and given you the exact name, all dashes and dots and everything included, given you the exact name of that bucket and granted you full permissions and save that, then they need to get out of that bucket and not mess with it until you send them the email saying that you’ve created the transfer of the files.

At this point, Joe Demo we’re done we’re done with you for now. Now the easiest way for me to do this is to use Cloudberry S3 Explorer but that’s not available for Mac users, so I’m just going to touch on that real quick in Cloudberry. With Cloudberry you want to open it up and then go to your account that has the files that the customer wants and go ahead and set it up just like this. Both windows is your account and in one of those windows click on the green cube to create an external bucket. Type in the exact name of the bucket that the customer created for you. Click on okay. Open it up. Open up your bucket that contains the files that you want to transfer over.

Now then you need to grant these files full permissions and in Cloudberry S3 Explorer just right click, select all the files that you want to copy, then right click, go to ACL settings, all users, full control, so that all the boxes are checked. Click on okay, then right click and click on copy and that’s it. They’ll be copied over there and then you want to come back over and right click on your files on your bucket and remove those permissions or put them back to where they were, and in this case it was private. That’s using Cloudberry Explorer, again very simple, no fuss no muss.

Now let’s go ahead and use Cyberduck so that the Mac users can do the same thing. The process is exactly the same as far as prepping the bucket for you to gain access. The only difference here is we’re using Cyberduck. I’ve already logged in to Cyberduck for my account that contains the files that the customer wants. Now we need to open up another browser.

Come up here to file, new browser and in this browser here we come up to open connection and here in the server and at the very front of this, s3.amazonaws.com, you want to put in the name of the bucket and then a dot. This is what it looks like, the name of the bucket, dot, and then the rest of what was already in there, s3.amazonaws.com. Then put in your access key that use to log in to your normal account here. Put in your access key and your secret access key. Well you think I’ve done this before. Then click on connect.

In this case it’s going to connect to your account but only show the bucket that you put in that box up there, in this case the bucket that you need to transfer those files to. Let’s go ahead and double click on this to open it up, then double click on bucket on your account that you’ve got those files in that need to go over here. We’re going to use the same files here in this example. Now then just like we did with Cloudberry S3 Explorer, we need to grant this full permissions, so go ahead and select the files you’re going to be copying over to the customer’s account, and then come on up here to get info or right click on those files and then click on info.

In either case you’re going to end up with the same spot, and wherever you end up here, be sure to select permissions then come on down here to the lower left and click on Amazon customer email address and here you will want to enter the customer’s login email address. I forgot to mention that earlier. You’re going to need the customer’s login email address. You’re not going to need their access keys or secret keys or any of that other stuff, just the email address that they use to log in to the account that has the bucket that you need this stuff transferred to. Then grant full permissions or full control and then just close this out and the permissions had been granted.

Now we just simply drag and drop them on in here. Drag and drop. Here’s the transfer taking place. It’s only showing one but there’s actually 2 files that are being transferred and we’re good. Come on over here to the receiving bucket, click on refresh, tada!

And that is how you can transfer files from one account to another account whether you are a Mac user using Cyberduck or a Windows user using Cyberduck or a Windows user using Cloudberry S3 Explorer. That’s going to bring us to the end of this video. Thanks for watching and you have a great day.