[TOOL] How to use Amazon S3 Firefox Organizer (S3Fox)

While the "S3" in Amazon S3 stands for "Simple Storage Service", its usability can sometimes be downright unfriendly due to a high geek factor: while that's great if you're strong technically, relating its concepts to more familiar models will help. For instance, an S3 bucket is like, but not exactly the same as a folder. But using the file-folder metaphor is accessible, and that's where cross-platform S3Fox comes in: it's a Firefox add-on that allows you to navigate S3 buckets as if they were folders and transfer files.

You'll need to signup with Amazon S3 to get started, and read the details to clarify if it's right for you — I know people using S3 as a home backup service and it's quite flexible, but that versatility is also why it can be hard to understand. Which is why it's great to have an easy tool like S3Fox.

S3Fox is among the better S3 clients and pretty easy to use once you get going, but I made the above video tutorial because there were a few subtle hitches that tripped me and some of my colleagues at Linden Lab up (we use S3 to host Viewer downloads, video tutorials, among many other things). I decided it'd be broadly useful, and even got an awesome note from the creator, Rahul Jonna.

Notes:

• S3 has a 5GB filesize limit. I ran into this the hard way when trying to upload multi-gigabyte movie files.
• It'd be nice if S3Fox supported upload resume. Some clients like Jungle Disk claim to, but I had many problems with it on my Mac.
• I've used a variety of other S3 clients and have run into odd glitches with most of them — I find there are more elegant ones on Mac than Windows, but even Transmit erroneously can't read some buckets that S3Fox can.
• Both small groups and large companies use S3. I just found out Vimeo stores its thumbnails on S3, e.g., http://ts.vimeo.com.s3.amazonaws.com/521/669/5216692_200.jpg