S3Toolbox

Amazon S3 is an online file storage platform I use quite intensively to save my backups and to store multimedia files served by a website I run.

The pricing for this service is quite good: $0.15 per GByte/month of storage used, $0.10 per GByte of data uploaded and $0.17 per GByte of data downloaded.

Amazon doesn’t give you any client to use its service but only a HTTTP or SOAP API. So, if you are not a developer, you need to use a third party user interface. I decided to write my own client because the only commercial tool I really like is Bucket Explorer but is costs nearly $50. Also I thought it would have been great fun.

So, here it is S3Toolbox, a completely free client UI for Amazon S3. Woo hoo! It is still in beta and at the moment it only supports basic transfer operations to and from Amazon S3. My plain is to keep working on this project and add all the functionalities offered by Amazon S3: permissions, signed urls, CloudFront, logging.

S3Toolbox only works with Windows XP or newer and requires .NET Framework 3.5 . As soon as I release a new version (and I promise this is going to happen very often) it should be downloaded automatically so there is no need to come back to this page to look for updates. The installation is not needed: just drop the files in a newly created folder and execute the application. This also means that S3Toolbox is completely portable and can be run from any USB drive or memory stick.

What I really need at this early stage are feedbacks from the users. S3Toolbox is still work in progress and probably there are bugs I haven’t yet found. So if you use Amazon S3 give S3Toolbox a try and tell me about anything wrong you find or any feature you really think should be implemented.

Click here to download S3Toolbox