Initial Take: Amazon S3 (Bonus! S3 Mac App)

Posted by Roopesh Sheth Published in Review, Tips, Tools, Utilities, simplify

If you have off-site/hosted storage needs and haven’t looked at Amazon S3, you really should.

What is it?

Amazon S3 (Super Simple Storage) is basically a pretty cheap ($0.15/GB at the time of this writing) storage cloud that anyone can use. Well, anyone with an Amazon account. So, basically everyone.

How do I work with S3?
You have a lot of options of how to interact with S3:

You can mount it as a disk on a Mac, Linux, or Windows machine, which I found to be unreliable.
Use s3fox in Firefox (or Flock) to transfer to/from S3, which also provided me mixed results, at best.
Use jets3t, which includes a GUI, across any Java-capable platform to transfer files, which worked the best for me. The only downside of this Java application is that it doesn’t integrate with any OS well, so drag and drop won’t work.

Update!! Oops, I was wrong! JetS3t does allow for drag-and-drop on my Mac. Even cooler!

There’s also the command line s3cmd, which works pretty well, but there’s no progress indicator during file transfers.
Some file transfer applications (like Panic’s Transmit) will let you transfer directly to S3, though I found them to be unreliable, too.

What can I do with it?

Store files, duh! Seriously, though, you can do a lot. You can share files with specific people, groups, or the public using normal URLs. You can create Torrents of your files to share on BitTorrent. jets3t helps you do all these functions in the UI.

Why I like it!

Well, I host quite a few files (many offsite backups), and when looking for a webhost, I’m always looking for lots of storage, which is generally expensive. The beauty of S3 is that I can store a lot of data up there, and I’m only charged for the storage ($0.15/GB) and transfer ($0.18/GB download, $0.10/GB upload) monthly.

So let’s suppose I upload 20GB my first month ( (20GB x $.15) + (20GB x $.1810) = $6.60$5.00 ).

Then the next month I update a few files, let’s say 1GB’s worth. And let’s say I also pull some files down, let’s say 5GB. So, ( (21GB x $.15) + (5GB x $.18) + (1GB x $.10) = $4.05$4.15 ). And all my files are still available.

Best of all, S3 provides a pretty damn fast connection. And since you can share files privately or publicly using standard URLs, you can link to them directly from webpages or use S3 for fast image hosting.

Bonus! S3 Mac App!

So, as I mentioned above, I like jets3t. However, launching it from within a Terminal window is tedious. So I used Platypus to create a Mac app file, which you can run from anywhere on your Mac.

jets3t.app.zip

Amazon S3 Initial Rating: