Today we discussed why your business needs to use Amazon S3.
Well, we didn’t discuss how you actually use Amazon S3. Here are 4 apps you can use to manage your Amazon S3 account on your Mac…
1. Transmit (free trial, recommended)
We use Transmit for FTP on the Mac, so it was a natural fit to use it for Amazon S3 access. They say “Manage your simple storage service, Mac-style”. That’s a great explanation – it’s easy, simple, and just works. Download Transmit.
2. S3Fox – Firefox Plugin (free, also recommended)
S3Fox is a great solution to manage your Amazon S3 account on both a Mac and PC. We use it extensively on our PC’s – and sometime on the Mac when Transmit isn’t already open. S3Fox also helps you manage your Amazon CloudFront (CDN) service by setting up your distribution URLs and authorization. Download S3Fox.
3. S3Hub (free)
I’ve not personally tried S3Hub but seems to have the standard feature set – upload/download/folders/permissions – as the other S3 Mac clients do. However there are some killer features for S3Hub that put it at the top of my list for software to try. First off there is a share features that lets you give access to other S3 users – by sharing buckets and granting access to files with other. It will also let you automatically set permissions on newly uploaded files. You can also rename files – which you are surprisingly unable to do with Transmit. Download S3Hub.
4. Jungle Disk
I have also yet to give Jungle Disk a try because I’ve been happy using Transmit and S3Fox – and Jungle Disk isn’t free. But, I’ve heard good things about the service that claims to let you “store files and automatically backup data easily and securely to Amazon.com’s S3 Storage Service”. The Apple Blog says,
The best feature of Jungle Disk Desktop is the fact that your Jungle Disk mounts just like your iDisk – allowing you to access your files directly from the Finder. Drag and drop, copy and delete. You can use your Jungle Disk just like any other hard drive.
What software do you use to manage your Amazon S3 service on your Mac? Let us know in the comments!
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{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ve already installed jungledisk and s3hub. s3hub feels like the FF s3 plugin at first glance. having drag/drop in jungle disk appears to be the big bonus methinks. nice post.
You forgot Cyberduck!
http://cyberduck.ch/
Gen – Thanks! I was unaware that Cyberduck had Amazon S3 support.. That is free, right? How do you like it for S3 access?
It’s free and open source to boot. It works very well.
What about Interarchy?
http://nolobe.com/interarchy
The original and best Amazon S3 browser.
@Kermit – Thanks for letting me know about Interarchy! I’ll check it out!
Thanks for the post, Andy. I tried using Cyberduck to access S3 but failed miserably. It wouldn’t accept my login info. This is coming from someone who uses Cyberduck exclusively as my main FTP client.
Giving S3hub a go as we speak. I have 50GB of raw pre-recorded podcasts that I need to get off my drive asap. What’s the best place for them? S3, of course!
Alex Luft’s last blog post..TechNest Report Podcast 34 – The make-up show
I’ve been using Transmit and S3Fox for the most part – both work excellent!
Ok, S3Hub works… but doesn’t work to delete a huge amount of files. Cyberduck doesn’t log in. Going to try S3Fox and Transmit.
Alex Luft’s last blog post..Some sites still don’t think Twitter is important
Let me know how it goes.. Transmit should work just like an FTP client
So after trying out Cyberduck, Transmit, and S3Hub, only one worked 100%: Transmit.
- Cyberduck didn’t even connect to S3. It didn’t recognize the user name/password, even after regenerating the secret access key (password) on amazon’s web services site.
- S3Hub connected. But couldn’t delete more than a certain amount of files at a time. I had about 10,000 files that were a few years old up on S3 in one bucket. I needed to delete all of them. But when I selected more than 50 files at a time and deleted, S3Hub hung. So it wasn’t really deleting anything, just hanging.
- Transmit did the trick. It deleted everything I needed to be deleted in one fell swoop. I’m now uploading 50GB worth of raw podcast files from my podcast http://podcast.TechNestReport.com that I needed off my local drive. It seems to be going just fine. The only “downside” is that Transmit costs $30, but I’ll gladly pay for quality software.
Well, there you have it. Hopefully Cyberduck and S3Hub will get better by this time next year. One can only hope!
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Alex – Thanks for the follow up on your experience! Perhaps a guest post is in order!
Would just like to add ForkLift to the list. I use ForkLift for file management, but it also happens to handle my S3 account and can also backup data to S3 from my other FTP accounts, without having to first move them to my local machine. Granted, this may not be such a big deal for other users, but I manage several websites, and it makes doing backups much easier.
Also, it lets me preview and edit files over s3.
ForkLift looks very cool thanks for recommending it!
I would suggest to add the CrossFTP into the list, a very stable client. http://www.crossftp.com/
Its foundation version is free and supports normal S3 and FTP operations.
Great post! You can also include in your list S3fm, an online Amazon S3 file manager. Works with all majors OSs and browsers including mac/safari
http://s3.amazonaws.com/s3fm/index.html
100% Ajax, no installation required, runs directly from Amazon S3 servers, secure and convenient.
Alex – that's is a very cool tool thank you for sharing!
Sure thing. Glad you liked it.
Now available with a short and sweet URL: http://www.s3fm.com/