Amazon S3 is the source of many a success story. The enourmously popular storage service has a wonderful API and it comes at a price that is hard to beat for all the features it offers.
Data import/export
Today Amazon announced a feature that is sure to draw some more attention. The data import/export feature gives you essentially the possibility to snailmail Amazon your Harddisks for ingestion or extraction to or from S3.
So where you previously had to copy all your Terbytes over the intertubes, you can now just slap a stamp on your harddisks (better make sure they are well packaged and backed up) and send them on their way. It is no secret that despite all technical progress, physical transport of media often still offers a lot more bandwidth at a cheaper price than internet transfer. What's more, you can even save the transfer cost per gigabyte that AWS would charge you otherwise. Instead they charge with a more appropriate cost per hour/per device model at a pretty reasonable price. AWS even invented a packaging API to make sure there are no misunderstandings how you want to have your data stored.
Overall this makes S3 hugely more attractive to businesses with huge backup needs or media storage requirements, but also for a transition to or from traditional storage media. Handling of your S3 data just got way easier - which brings me to the next point.
S3 Organizers
One thing that always struck me as odd is the lack of good GUI tools written for S3. This situation has been improving dramatically lately.
Sure there is always jets3t's cockpit, but while great from a code perspective, it's is not exactly a crowd pleaser - just look at the GUI . And S3Fox may have mass appeal, but do I really want to risk the process instability of firefox when uploading large files and browsing at the same time? Is the colourful CloudBerry S3 Explorer mature enough for me to handle my data on a daily basis? Or should I pay 66$ for Jollat and have additional Ec2 capabilities at my hands? The only way to tell, obviously, is a tryout. So that's what we did.
JetS3t cockpit
Only few words can describe the beauty of the API that is the jets3t API. It's a masterfully crafted, stable piece of software you can rely on and it also offers basic CloudFront integration in the newest version. Unfortunately the GUI is not at all polished. Just what a unix hacker would like.
S3Fox
S3Fox was one of the first clients to support CloudFront. It is fully featured and leaves not much to be desired. Except of course an overview of the buckets size. We realize this is hard to do on large buckets since it would take a lot of LIST requests to estimate the whole size (amazon should really provide an API call to gather stats about the overall bucket size), but it would have been nice if the listed objects. Unfortunately the Client runs in-process with Firefox, so if the main process dies, so does your data transfer.
Jollat
Jollat looks nice on the surface. It integrates EC2 and S3 functionality and promises to be your command center to the cloud. But actually those 66$ are wasted money. The functionality of Jollat does not justify that price.
Bucket Explorer
This one is a fully featured, commercial client. It costs 50$ and offers an overwhealming set of features. The "versioning" and "Trash bin" functionality alone are worth the 50$ - no more accidentally deleted files. Incredibly this client even tracks your bucket usage via logfiles and reports on their usage as well as your SimpleDB usage. If you are a heavy user of S3 you might be interested in this client.
CloudBerry Explorer
CloudBerry is home to the hugely popular free version of CloudBerry Explorer, which is a feature complete S3 client, with all bells and whistles. It is a very mature piece of Software, that offers the most beautyful and polished UI of all Clients. Unfortunately it's a Windows only solution. Lately CloudBerry Labs released a pro version that offers advanced features like encryption, compression and folder synchronization. With these features it is set to become a worthy opponent of the Bucket Explorer. There is even a public beta of the Pro version that expires on first of July, so get it while it's hot.
Conclusion
If you are on Windows you are looking for a stable, free client with a hot UI and great features there is no way around the CloudBerry Explorer. If you are willing to pay and need more advanced functionality you should consider having a look at Bucket Explorer, while CloudBerry seems to be gaining ground fast.
