Mike,

Have you seen JungleDisk? SOunds similar, but it’s a network drive (on Windows, not sure about Mac or Linux).

Your files are encrypted on S3 which is nice for security but necessitates JD on any machine that you want to access your files from. JD is currently free, though not open source. It’s here:

http://jungledisk.com/

I wrote about Interarchy 8.1 on TUAW a little while ago:

http://www.tuaw.com/2006/06/21/interarchy-8-1/

It is an FTP client that allows you to send files to Amazn S3. Pretty slick.

Mike, the bits have already been released to OPML Editor users, but I haven’t written the docs yet. I want to do some more tweaking before doing that. Should be avaiable by the end of the week…

And it’s Mac and Windows…

The next generation of Amazon’s Instant Website (http://www.amazon.com/iws) will use S3 as persistence for files and temp data. IWS today (and the next release as well) uses other Amazon Web Services as well, like the E-commerce Service and the Co-branded Order Pipeline.

In other words, Amazon does eat its own dog food

ElephantDrive is another interesting application that is using S3 — the service is free today while in beta, but moving to a paid model shortly (1 GB will always be free).

It differs from JungleDisk (which is an excellent app in its own right) in that 1) you don’t need an S3 account of your own, 2) it automates scheduling and synchronization, 3) it is designed to support sharing and collaboration, and 4) it’s Windows only, at the moment (Java client in development now). Amazon’s service is only one of multiple storage repostitories being employed by ElephantDrive, but it is extremely useful in managing storage growth.

Related note: We will be discussing both the technical implementation of S3 in ElephantDrive’s architecture, as well as the economic implications of using services like S3 to business models, at this week’s MashupUniverstiy and MashupCamp2.0.

We’re using S3 to support our photo sharing service at Pongyow (we offer a photo/blog/friend site designed for families and especially new moms with lots of baby photos).
It’s totally transparent to the user, but we learned we needed to make the upload to S3 asynchronous, to maintain responsiveness.

I’m a beta tester for Elephant Drive and am very impressed with it. It only took a couple of minutes to get running and has been really easy to use. I listened to the S3 team podcast a while back and it’s pretty cool to see apps that have been built on top of this.

Michael,

How does ElephantDrive get around the security issues of using a shared S3 account? Theoretically, anyone with access the the access key for that account can get at the data stored using it.

im using Jungle Drive, and its works a treat.

They have a client for Mac (Universal Binary), Linux and Windows.

I would prefer to rely on Jungle Drive, since its uses the Amazon S3 service.

someone know of a good S3 ‘browser’?

i’ve downloaded and used all the sample codes - for 3 different languages, at least, and some of them work at least a little bit, but none of them actually lets me perform operations that work consistently. command-line, web, you name it - they all broke somehow. i’m trying to get a lot more familiar with buckets and lists and acl’s and public URLs all that before i attempt my own api.

Not crazy about the amazon-provided java api. gonna axis-wsdl-to-java and see if that gets better results.

looks like I found a partial answer to my question:

‘NS3 Manager’ is exactly what I was looking for. It’s a bit buggy - might have something to do with the fact that is Mircosoft technology - not sure - but it does what I want. Upload/download files, change the permissions on them, drag and drop a bit, set the content types, find out the URL for a particular uploaded file, etc. Like I said, buggy, but it gets the job done. It’s the killer app for developers as far as I can tell. Now we just need eclipse/idea plugins.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/ns3/home

And with bucket names being needing to be unique across *all* of S3, the new ‘domain name registration’ race is on:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/CrunchNotes/CrunchNotes_Is_Da_Bomb

I guess you can always do domain forwarding/masking/etc., but that seems a bit of a pain.

Hi all,

I have no idea if anyone is still watching this list, but I was reviewing posts regarding ElephantDrive and noticed that there was an unanswered question from Rick Gregory with regard to access key security.

Rick - ElephantDrive does not provide an interface for users to use the own S3 access keys, nor does it ever deliver any of the S3 secret access keys to users. Instead, we create encrypted signatures and pass them to users, so that they can access a specific file for a limited time only (but nothing else ever). Obviously, we have to take all possible precautions to protect the security and integrity of our secret keys, and they are never distributed.

Further, all objects stored by ElephantDrive at S3 are encrypted prior to delivery and decoupled from the associated meta-data, in order to ensure maximum abstraction and security in the *extremely* unlikley event that either one of our secret keys was compromised or Amazon itself was compromised.

I hope this answer addresses your concern, however tardy it may be — additionally I’d like to stress that this is the system that was in place at the time you asked the question (not something implemented later in the game), and I apologize for not responding sooner (next time I post regarding ElephantDrive, I’ll be sure to keep a close watch on the thread).

Best,

Mike

Just a quick note, InfiniteFTP provides true FTP access to Amazon S3. Use any FTP client to access Amazon S3.

http://www.infiniteftp.info/

* Note this is different from an “FTP client” application that looks like FTP but interfaces to S3. This is a true FTP server running at Amazon providing access to S3 via any FTP client. Tested with many Windows, OS X, and Linux FTP clients.

* This is also different from an S3 bucket/object browser. Those are very useful for programming but not too useful for file transfers, online backup, and storage.