S3Browse Team Blog 

Maintenance of Web Servers

Because of a physical relocation (again) of our servers, we have to shut down our services at s3browse.com for a short(er) period of time.

This event will take place on Monday, April 21, 2007 at 11:00 CET.
We estimate the time to do the relocation and tests to be at most 3 hours.

Please be aware that:
* uploads through the web will be aborted
* any pending uploads using the Java client will complete
* new uploads from the Java client will fail

We apologize for any inconvenience.

The S3Browse Team

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Service unavailable due to Maintenance

Because of a physical relocation of our servers, we have to shut down our services at s3browse.com for a short period of time.

This event will take place on Wednesday, December 5, 2007 at 22:30 CET.
Our hosting provider estimates the time to do the relocation and tests to be at most 8 hours.

Please be aware that:

• uploads through the web will be aborted
• any pending uploads using the Java client will complete
• new uploads from the Java client will fail

We apologize for any inconvenience.

The S3Browse Team

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HTTP Headers in Meta data

Adding Meta data to your object before uploading to S3, has been a feature available since S3Browse.com went live. In S3UC, after selecting one or more objects in the list, you can add as many Meta key-value pairs as you want.

The "Content-type" is a required key and cannot be removed. Its value is initially set based on the file extension of the selected object but can be changed if needed.

Version 0.8.8 has extended the Meta editor part of S3UC by providing a sub-menu with relevant HTTP Headers.

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Upload with Access Control

Today (i.e. as of version 0.8.8), we introduce a small feature with respect of controlling the access of your objects in S3.

Until now, all files that are uploaded either through our web client or S3UC, will have its access control set to private. In order to change that afterwards, e.g. setting the control to public-read, you can navigate to that object in your bucket list, request for its details, add Everyone to the control list and mark it for public-read.

The good news is that now you can set the access control before uploading your file. This feature is available in both the Web-upload and the Client-upload.


Changing the Access Control in S3UC.

Changing the Access Control on the Web-upload page.

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More S3UC Tweaks

The 0.8.7 update of the S3Browse Upload Client (S3UC) brings a few minor enhancements.

Providing correct and useful upload status information, has been an outstanding issue for too long. Now, the overall progress is computed for all the files listed and estimates are given for both the speed and the remaining time.

The maximum concurrent connections has been increased from 2 to 4. This may improve the upload speed depending on your network capacity. Reports from the S3 community show that increasing this number beyond 4 will not show a significant speedup.

The "Upload All" action will only upload new files and those that failed before. Any file that has been uploaded in the current client session will not be uploaded again. The option to automatically remove a file after uploading it, is a feature we are evaluating for the next version.

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Recursively select files in S3UC

As of version 0.8.4 the S3Browse Upload Client, also known as S3UC, has a new feature that allows you to select multiple files by choosing the containing directory. S3UC will use that directory as the "Target Directory" name and will collect, recursively, all files found in that directory.

Note that S3 does not support the concept of directories. However, most tools emulate this by interpreting the slash "/" character as the standard directory separator. So does S3Browse, as explained here

By prefixing the path information when selecting multiple files from a directory, your organization of files is preserved on S3.

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Uploading files to Amazon S3 via the S3Browse Web Upload

With the S3Browse website you can easily upload files to a S3 bucket. No software needs to be installed on the client PC. A web browser is all you need. To get started, you need an Amazon AWS account that is enabled for use of the Simple Storage Service (S3). You can upload files to one of your own buckets or to a bucket owned by somebody else. Of course, that person needs to authorize you for writing to that bucket.

Advantages of uploading using the browser are both simplicity and the fact that no additional software is required. However, the user interface is clumsy for uploading lots of files and not very efficient when uploading large ones. (because of S3Browse being the trusted man-in-the-middle).

For uploading lots of files or files larger than 25 MB, S3Browse offers a better solution: The S3Browse Upload Client (S3UC). This is a Java based client application that allows you to upload large amounts of data directly to the Amazon S3 servers.

See the post “Uploading using the S3Browse Upload Client” for an explanation of the S3Browse Upload Client. This post will guide you through the Web Upload functionality of S3Browse.

The following steps explain how this process works:

• Sign in at S3Browse.com. All the buckets you own will be listed on the homepage. You can select one or you can create a new bucket. If you want to upload to a bucket that is not owned by you, you can add that bucket to your list by using the link “Add Other Bucket”.
  
• Clicking on a bucket link will open an explorer page for that bucket. The explorer lets you browse through the content of a bucket. At the top of the table is a “Web Upload” link. This link will take you to entry form page. Select one or more files to upload.
  
• Optionally you can specify a prefix/path if you want to organize your file using a directory like structure.
  
• If you want to store the uploads using the same file names and you don’t need to specify extra meta-data then you can select the processing option “Send the files directly to the Amazon S3”. Otherwise select the other option, this will allow you to change the file names and meta-data.
  
• Once you press the submit button the upload to the S3Browse server will start. Depending on your bandwidth and the file sizes this may take a while. A progress bar at the bottom shows how much time is to remain. At the end of this step, your files reside in a temporary folder on the S3Browse server.
  
• If you selected to send the files directly you will now see the Upload Progress view. Your files are uploaded from the S3Browse server to Amazon S3 in a background process. This view show the progress of that process. It is not neccesary to wait for the uploads to finish. You can always return to the Upload Progress view via the menu option "View Upload Progress".
  
• The optional second step of a Web Upload is changing the file and meta-data. In the current beta version (0.9) of S3Browse, the only meta-data you can change is the Content-Type. Future version will allow you to add other meta-data. After you press the Submit button you will see the Upload Progress view discussed in the previous bullit.
  
• Once the files have been transferred to Amazon S3, the local copies on the S3Browse server will be deleted automatically. This will also happen in case you cancel the upload.

Hopefully this post made it clear how and when to use the Web Upload functionality of S3Browse. Remember that we also offer a client based upload to S3 which is a better option when handling large files.

Please let us know if you still have questions. If you have ideas on how we can improve our service we would also like to hear from you.

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S3Browse says: Welcome

The S3Browse team welcomes you to this new site. As you may have noticed, we've reached Beta status which means most features are there to use and evaluate.

This blog will keep you up to date with news, changes, enhancements and bug fixes that is driven by user experience and needs. Please feel free to drop us a note with your feedback.

At the moment we are working on the nice-to-haves list and improvement in usability and looks.

Happy browsing,

S3Browse Team

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