Jeremy Zawodny gave a great list of S3 backup tools, Marc Hedlund said S3 is everywhere. However I feel I am still not able to find a good enough S3 application to be able to make S3 a more consumer friendly serivce.

Maybe Jungle Disk is one of the closest one, however Jungle disk seemed have many problem in my Computer, and it’s UI and usability is not as good as I expected.

At this time, the most popular consumer service for S3 is seemed to be used as a backup storage, however I feel S3 can be used to do more. In the amazon’s s3 application list, most of the high ranked application are either web UI or client UI for s3 itself, it’s also common that photo/video startups using S3 as backend storage.

I think what ”a personal storage serveice” can offer is not just a “remote disk”, it can be more, and for the remote storage or online backup, show user a file explorer UI or mount it as a network drive is not the best user friendly design. For me, I hate to copy some large files to a “remote drive” and see a never ending progress bar sitting on my screen and I have no idea when it will end and if it will fail.

There is a very nice backup shareware named “second copy“, it’s nice because backup tasks can be predefine and executed as tasks silencely and will not break even if there is some error happen. Now secondcopy has support FTP storage, I think it will be great if it could support S3 or other online storage.

Popularity: 13% [?]

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I met a very strange problem these days on my PC: When I plug  any kind of USB storage device into my PC (Moveable HD, USB flash disk, USB Card reader etc.),  the drive never show up in my PC. But it seemed the USB device works pretty well, when I open the “computer management/disk management”, it also seemed that everything is fine.

From “disk management” I found some problem, the Driver Letter assigned to the new disk is the same as the Jungle Disk’s !  For some reason, Jungle disk did not notify the system that it has used that driver letter, and that caused the problem  After I shutdown Jungle Disk, everything become ok.

I have removed Jungle Disk, the S3 virtual disk,   I have a couple of reasons:

* Caused the driver letter conflict (what I said in this post)

* Jungle disk use its own directly structure, so it create very strange directory/file names in your S3 space, so you can’t simple give out a s3 URL to share the file, I really dislike this, one advantage of using a network disk is make the file sharing much easier, with Jungle Disk, S3 become less functional.

I am using S3Fox to manage my S3 files, and I am still looking a better software which can provide similar feature as Jungle Disk does.

Popularity: 8% [?]

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Finally I got an EC2 account, it cost me wait in the line for around 2 months!

Cool tools that really useful to hack around EC2, S3

EC2 Firefox UI:

The extension can be installed by opening the .xpi file contained in the archive that includes this README file. Alternatively, the latest version of the .xpi file is hosted in Amazon S3 at the following URL:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2ui.xpi

S3 Firefox:

Provides a graphical, FTP-like interface to S3.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3247/

Play around

With EC2 firefox UI it’s pretty much easier to get around, esp. for first EC2 users like me. I just pick one amazon’s AIM to have a try. Two things need to notice when using EC2 FF UI:

1. Need to create a key pair before launch any instance, this is used for login through ssh

EC2 ff UI generated a OpenSSH private key, but I use PuTTY, PuTTY don’t recognize OpenSSH’s *.pem format certificate, so I need to use PuTTY keygen to convert the key to PuTTY’s ppk.

2. Need to enable SSH port(22) in “security groups” tab. By default all ports blocked so no way to connect.

Then I got this screen:

Using username “root”.
Authenticating with public key “imported-openssh-key”

__| __|_ ) Rev: 2
_| ( /
___|\___|___|

Welcome to an EC2 Public Image

Apache2+MySQL4

__ c __ /etc/ec2/release-notes.txt

[root@domU-12-31-35-00-15-A1 ~]#

Wow! I will play around and tweak more in it, and I probably will use EC2 in my next project.

In compare with Godaddy’s virtual dedicated hosting, EC2 is expensive, however EC2 have so many  advantages that is really valuable for a serious startup or project:

* Launch a new instance (like add a new server) is just minutes.  Godaddy or other hosting service generally need 24 hours or more;

* Dynamically change how many instance(servers) u need, and can controlled programmablly, I think that’s the best of EC2, so image that my web site have huge access at day time but few visitors at night, I can launch 10 servers to serv the high traffic, and only use 1 server at night! and that’s full automatically !  That’s a cool feature that no other hosting company can provide. And I believe that’s the future of hosting!

* Fee is charged by instance, other hosting providers, once you decided, you have to pay by all the time even u don’t need it.

Popularity: 10% [?]

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