This post will focus on CloudBerry Online Backup in hope that this product will become your tool of choice for automating backup and restore processes.  I am going to show you how easy it is s to sign-up for Amazon S3 account and register it with CloudBerry Backup.

Just remember, signing up for Amazon S3 is a two-step process. First you should create an Amazon account. Second you have to sign-up for S3 service.  If you ever bought a book or any other goods on Amazon you should have that account already and you can safely skip the first step and move to the second.

How to create Amazon account

Go to http://aws.amazon.com/ website and click the link at the very top right corner of the screen.

This will take you to the next screen, where you can create a new account or use your existing Amazon account.

This will take you to the next step, where you confirm your email and specify your password

This will take you to the next step where you have to fill in your address information and accept a license agreement.

The last step will take you to the confirmation step where you can specify Amazon Web Service you want to sign up to – in our case it is Amazon Simple Storage Service of Amazon S3.

Note: you have to sign-up for each Amazon S3 service separately.

How to sign-up for Amazon S3 service

This is a second part of the sign-up process. After you created an Amazon account you have to sign-up for the service itself.  The link will take you to the Amazon S3 service page and you have to click “Sing Up For Amazon S3” button.

Next page will walk you thru Amazon S3 low pricing structure and you will have to specify your credit card details at the very bottom of the page.

Don’t worry! My personal Amazon S3 monthly bills rarely exceed a couple of bucks!

Pass a few more steps to complete sign-up and you will get to a confirmation screen

By now you are successfully signed-up for Amazon S3 service.

How to obtain CloudBerry Backup

Note: CloudBerry Backup is a Windows only tool. If you are working on other platforms you will have to search for other tools.

Go to http://cloudberrydrive.com/   and follow the link to download page.

You will have to fill a registration form and we will send you an email with the download link.  Please don’t enter fake emails as you will never get a download link and waste your time. Click the link in the email to download the installation package. Install the product and run it.

Once we finish beta testing phase and release the product we will remove the registration form. For now we want to be able to keep touch with the beta testers.

Now you have to tell CloudBerry Backup your S3 account. Run CloudBerry Backup and click Backup Wizard button on the toolbar as shown on the screen. 

Create Backup Plan Wizard will come up. Just skip the welcome step and move to the second step where you have to specify your Amazon S3 account. Getting Access and Secret keys (also called Access Identifiers) is a little tricky and we will explain it in the next section.

How to get Access Identifiers

Access and Secret keys are also known as Access Identifiers and you can think of them as of your username and password.  To get them go to the http://aws.amazon.com/ website and click Access Identifiers link as shown below.

Scroll the page down a little bit to get to “Access Key ID and Secret Access Key” section. For obvious reasons I don’t show my keys here.

Click show button to display your Secret key.

Copy keys and past them in to the CloudBerry Backup Create Backup Plan Wizard screen as shown on the picture below.  Once you enter your keys the Bucket name list will get enabled. If you have followed my instructions and just created an account you don’t have any buckets just yet and the list should be empty.

Note: if you are not familiar with Amazon S3 terms you can think of the bucket as of a top level folder.

If you had S3 account before the Bucket name list should show every bucket you created already.

I don’t have a bucket, so what?

For this particular case we have an option to create a bucket for you. The bucket name should be globally unique across all Amazon S3 accounts (kind of domain names).  Check out Amazon S3 documentation if you want to learn more about bucket naming rules.  Currently we default the name of the bucket to your computer name. To ensure the name uniqueness in the future versions  we will generate a default name based on a globally unique identifier. 

You have a choice of creating a bucket in the US or Europe data center. The decision should be made primarily based on your physical location as you have to choose the closest data center to speed up data transfer.  You may also want to check out Amazon S3 storage and transfer fees as EU buckets are slightly more expensive.  

Note that you have an option to use secure SSL connection to Amazon S3 to protect your data during transfer. 

If you don't have S3 account we provide you a link to Amazon Web Services website where you can create one. 

Click OK to create a bucket. The last thing you have to specify is a Backup path. It could be anything you want  like mybackuppath that I entered on the screen below.  

Leave Save these S3 settings as default checked if you don’t want to look this complicated screen anymore.

Note: you can always change your account settings later in the Tools|Options General tab.

Now just go through the rest of the Wizard steps and create your backup plan. You can also check out our previous blog post if you want to get an idea of the main functionality provided by CloudBerry Backup. We also suggest that you watch the video on our website.

Conclusion

CloudBerry Backup is a powerful program that automates your backup and restores processes. We advocate and idea that you should set and forget about it. However, setup process could be a little tricky even though we try to simplify it as much as possible.

 Now you are ready to enjoy Amazon S3 with CloudBerry Backup, you can create Backup Plans, copy files to S3 and schedule the process.  We wish you never need to use our restore functionality.  

If you came here by chance and don’t have CloudBerry Backup yet you can download it at http://cloudberrydrive.com/

• Backup Your Data Online to Amazon S3