Amazon S3 is an online storage service which is blisteringly fast and ridiculously low cost. You can store and transfer Gigabytes of data using their service and you’ll end up with monthly bill in single dollar figures.
It sound greats, and it is, but it is just a service and a bare bones service at that. S3 is not very accessible to the average person, but there is a flourishing industry developing creating tools to hide the complexity from users and make this a very useful service.
One such tool is S3Fox, a plug-in available for Firefox.
If you’re used to using FTP then this will all seem very familiar. Once you have signed up for an S3 account and entered your credentials into S3Fox you’ll be presented with your local files in the left hand pane and the remote files stored on S3 in the right hand pane. You can use S3Fox to manage more than one account which is particularly useful if you have accounts for work, home or clients.
Select the files you want to copy to S3 and hit the big blue arrow between the two panes and off they go. It’s also possible to set up folder synchronisation.
The listings on the left hand pane can be set to display as thumbnails or a traditional file listing.
S3Fox isn’t just about file transfers though. You can also create new folders (called buckets) and manage who can access those folders, who can write files to those folders and who can change permissions.
Permissions can be set at the folder or file level and transfer can be done over https for secure (but slower) transfer.
S3Fox can be used as a full screen plug-in for when you’re concentrating on organising your files or it comes in a handy pop-up format that takes up a small amount of screen space but give you all of the common functionality. This works really nicely when you just need to grab a file name or check to see if someone had uploaded a particular file.
The pop-up is activated by clicking on an icon in Firefox’s status bar and glides smoothly back by clicking minimise.
One very nice feature is that you can right click on any file in the listing and copy the full URL of the file. S3 URLS are rather long and cumbersome and this feature is indispensible especially for sharing files or if you use S3 for hosting assets that will be linked to from a website or HTML newsletter.
Filed under: Free Fridays, Free Software, Web Browsers , amazon, aws, firefox, firefox extensions, mozilla, s3, s3fox
