Amazon S3

I've used Amazon S3 for several years as a paid file storage solution. My monthly bill is still below twelve dollars USD even though there are a few thousand gigabytes of content stored there in the cloud including all of my personal files, music and photos, business documents and content, client documents, and content as well as personal and client backups so it's very versatile with its storage. I believe it's important to use a variety of online backup solutions and hardware based solutions. I've experienced the worst case scenario with a computer hard drive and an external hard drive both failing without the latest backups complete. It's an overwhelming sense of loss knowing you can't retrieve that information because you can't call in a specialist to fix your dead hard drive. Once it's dead that it's it. As I far as I know anyways, you see hard drives brought back to life or data retrieved in interesting ways by spy's on television but that's not anything like reality in most cases obviously. I like that you can obtain a web URL and even a shortened version of this link right from your dashboard. There's a great free desktop software called CloudBerry which is free you can use as an Amazon S3 client. So after you install CloudBerry you can explore and interact with your Amazon S3 files from your computer without having to use an internet browser. I've used CloudBerry for many years, in fact, I've used it multiple times already today and this is often the case. It's easy to drag and drop files from your desktop into the CloudBerry software, just click on the files to select them, hover over the bucket or folder inside your bucket and release the mouse. The drag and drop technology takes care of the rest. It couldn't be easier to use. I also like the fact that Amazon S3 doesn't run on my computer all day long. I tend to keep the minimum amount of background processes running as possible in order to have the most performance available for other resource heavy software programs such as Photoshop and AutoCAD. But I can sort my files by date easily in order to know when to insert new backups of content from my computer starting at whichever date and that works for me.

It's not the most user friendly interface. Amazon S3 is a highly technical company and it shows in their SAAS. Everything is there for good reason, of course, it's simply so robust and specialized that a beginner user can't hope to utilize all of the potential made possible in your account to start. It would definitely take a paid expert to accomplish anything beyond creating buckets, uploading, and downloading files, and setting permissions on files and folders to allow downloading.

You can distribute files by updating their permissions for it to allow them to be downloadable and it's very reliable service as a software. The reliability of the infrastructure to go with the reasonable pricing which scales as I do makes Amazon the clear choice for my entire personal and business media and content. I appreciate more out of the box functionality offered by advanced digital asset management solutions such as WebDam which is awesome but beyond my current needs. And I appreciate Box and Dropbox and the new cool cloud storage I discovered recently HighTail which has a great free account and does larger files up to ten gigabytes. But I use them mostly for smaller projects because, in addition to the pricing and reliability of Amazon S3, it's also incredibly extensible should I need this in the future. If I need to create a way to collaborate or distribute my content in future this can be done by integrating the other possible services made available by Amazon. The are a few integrations with other cloud storage services which make them unique and valuable in their own way such as Office 365 integration which is great but once again that's more focused in terms of usage.