Sometimes you have to copy a lot of files to your Amazon S3 account. For instance you want to move your static HTML files and images off your hosting provider to Amazon S3 to take advantage of reliable and secure storage, cost efficiency and CloudFront CDN or you simply want to backup your files to S3.  CloudBerry Explorer can help you to make it easily and quickly.  

Note: this post assumes that you are familiar with CloudBerry Explorer. if you don’t we urge you to download it for free at http://s3explorer.cloudberrylab.com/

Introducing copy queue

Chose you source and destination, select the files you want to copy and click copy button (or move) on the toolbar. Click ok in the confirmation dialog.

The CloudBerry Explorer bottom panel will show you what we call the copy queue. Here you can monitor the progress, see which file is currently being copied and even check out the estimated time left.

You will also see all the errors occurred during the copy process.

Copy in background is on by default

By default copy in background is on, however it might happen that you turn it off by chance or with purpose. To control copy behavior you have to go to tools->options, General tab and ensure that “Run operations in background” option is “on”.

Copy queue controls

Now let’s examine some of the queue controls in details.  First, you can pause the queue, to stop copy process for a while.  Just click the Pause button.

Clicking Resume button will effectively resume the copy process where it left off.

Notice that since Amazon S3 doesn’t allow for partial uploads yet, you can’t stop the process in the middle of the file. In other words you can’t upload only part of the file, then pause upload and then upload the rest of the file.

If you are interested in Amazon’s plans on partial upload you can check out this thread on Amazon S3 official forum.

Remove completed tasks button will clean up the queue and remove the records of files that have been successfully copied, those that are indicated with “checked” icon.

Clear all will just remove every file from the queue in regardless of whether it was successfully copied or not.  Be careful with this option as files won’t be copied after you remove them from the queue.

 Now look at the status bar, it offers you at a glance statistics for your copy progress.  At the left you can see how many files have been copied successfully, failed and currently pending. 

In the middle there is a percentage indicator for the copy progress, average speed and estimated time left.

Hide Queue label is actually a button that will hide the queue panel to free up some screen space.  To show the panel again just click Show Queue label.

Don’t forget about permissions

 One of the many CloudBerry Explorer advantage is that it helps to apply ACL list to the files inside the bucket. Just setup ACL list how you want and it will automatically apply appropriate permission to the files inside the bucket when you copy them. You can find more info about that in one of my previous posts here . 

But here I just want to mention that ACL is applied in background too and this is exactly why you see Apply ACL items in the queue.

Hide to tray

Newer version of CloudBerry Explorer also provides you with ability to hide the product to tray to clean up your workspace on the screen. When copy process is finished you will get a message in the tray notification area similar to this one:

What is coming next

We realize that copy in background is not perfect at this stage and we are working on improving it. One thing that we are going to introduce in the next release is the ability to remember the queue and restore it when you restart the product.

In the commercial version we will also offer multithreading that will help to copy a large number of small files quickly. 

Conclusion

CloudBerry Explorer makes it significantly easier to copy large number of files to Amazon S3 storage. Even though there is a lot of room for improvement CloudBerry Explorer is a solid product that helps people to achieve common tasks related to Amazon S3 storage in an efficient and user friendly manner.

• Backup Your Data Online to Amazon S3