Amazon S3 as a Network Drive

logo_awsAmazon S3 is the leading and most mature cloud storage service in the market now. We have seen more and more customers started to use Amazon S3 for their storage need. 
For these customers, the ability to map Amazon S3 as a Network Drive is critical. Drive device-drive-cloudmapping allows them to double click on a file and editing it in place. From a usability perspective, there is no more user interface to learn because hard drive, or USB drive and now a cloud based drive is a very familiar concept in Windows user interface.
This article will document the steps it takes to map Amazon S3 as a network drive with the latest Gladinet Cloud Desktop.

Step 1 – Getting Started

After downloading and installing Gladinet Cloud Desktop, there are two places you can mount your Amazon S3 bucket as a network drive. First you can do it from the Management Console.
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The other place is from the Gladinet Cloud Desktop System-Tray icon. You can click on the My Gladinet Drive menu entry first. After that, you can click on the ‘Click to mount [cloud storage]’ entry to initiate the mounting process.
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Step 2 – Mounting Wizard

There are several Amazon S3 related entries for you to mount Amazon S3. Mostly it is based on region, such as US-East (US), US-West, EU and Asia regions.
If you have Amazon S3 compatible storage, such as Dunkel, Scality or Eucalyptus/Walus based cloud storage services, you can use the Amazon S3 Compatible Storage entry.
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Step 3  - Name Your Amazon S3 Folder (for Windows Explorer)

In this step, you would name the virtual directory that represent your Amazon S3 Bucket. A good practice is to name it the same as your Amazon S3 bucket.
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Now you will need to put in the Amazon S3 credentials. You will need to login to your http://aws.amazon.com/account/ web portal to get your account information.
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That is it! Now you have a network drive, with Amazon S3 Bucket showing up as a folder.
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If you wish to both map the drive to amazon s3 and also share your drive with your colleagues as a Microsoft Network Share, you can use Gladinet CloudAFS product.

Related Posts

Password Protect Amazon S3 Folders
Cloud Storage Case Study with a Real Estate Company
How to Sync Folder over Amazon S3
Convenient SQL Server Backup to Amazon S3
Access Amazon S3 from Desktop and File Servers
Map Amazon S3 As a Virtual Drive (v2 UI)

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